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THE HEART OF A 
MOTHER-TO-BE 



THE HEART OF A 
MOTHER-TO-BE 



BY 
MABEL HOTCHKISS ROBBINS 

Author of 
*'The Genius of Elizabeth Anne,'* etc. 




THE PILGRIM PRESS 

BOSTON CHICAGO 






^-^,K' 



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Copyright 1917 
By frank M. SHELDON 



THE PILGRIM PRESS 
BOSTON 



SEP 19 1917 

^Gf.A473574 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Hopes and Fears 3 

II. Lifted Curtains 17 

III. Ups and Downs 25 

IV. Behind the Scenes 39 

V. Views Afield 51 

VI. Heights and Depths 69 

VII. Spring Smiles and Frowns .... 84 

VIII. With the March of Things .... 97 

IX. Still Pressing On 114 

X. Fruition 138 



THE HEART OF A 
MOTHER-TO-BE 



THE HEART OF A 
MOTHER-TO-BE 

CHAPTER I 

Hopes and Fears 

January 9. For days now — yes, and 
weeks — a ghost has been walking in my 
heart, a little Fear-ghost, or is it Hope? 
Tap-tap, tap-a-tap, it goes up and down. 
And sometimes 1 have pretended not to 
hear it, and sometimes, quickening to half 
courage, I have made only swift and 
shamed and futile catches at it. But at 
last, in a strangely bold moment I do not 
yet understand, I have stalked it in its lair. 
I am sitting here face to face with it, and 
I have the truth: by me and through me a 
new life, a fresh soul, is to take on flesh 
and appear humanwise on this age-worn 
and doubtful and still green and oft-taken 
world-trail — by me, who just a few short 
months ago was only a near old-maid school- 
ma'am whose worldly ways were so " gone 
to seed " that she'd fallen into the habit of 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

mentally tagging her joys: " Festivity oc- 
casions. Treat accordingly. Cherish if 
possible. Attempt at least a becoming 
spirit of levity." 

Oh, wonder to come, as old in the scheme 
of things as the ancient and benign and 
smiling cosmic morn, and at once as new 
as the fresh snow on these hills — eventual 
man or woman out of spacelessness into 
space, out of eternal serenity into this mad, 
atomic, earthly dance, life of my life, and 
heart of my own heart, how shall I hide 
from you my utter unworthiness to furnish 
you life-blood? See, see! You have every 
reason to look; it is just a little rabbity 
wisp of a brown woman who is going down 
into the Death Valley after you, a little 
brown woman, thin to austere leanness and 
as common as a huckleberry in a woodlot. 
Her skin and hair are the worse for chalk 
dust, Little Ego; her hands remind her of 
nothing so much as claws; her eyes are 
lined, as they've a perfect right to be after 
— need I tell you how many years? — 
enough so that, between you and me, I 
smile sceptically even now, dabbling in the 
River of Doubt as did Sarah, wife of 
Abraham, in her tent in the plains of Mamre, 

4 



HOPES AND FEARS 

with the promise of the angels she had en- 
tertained unawares. Is it surprising that I 
quiver under this — God's spotlight — 
quiver, yes, and hold up my head, too. 
Thank Him, I have never taken any gross 
liberties with my anatomy and I still de- 
light in my long, cross-country meanderings 
to scale Mercury-footed such split-rail 
fences as remain to modernity. I shall 
want my strength, every shred of it for 
you, I am told, Little Ego, in the hour of 
your coming. Your coming! I gasp and 
try to remember that the world holds it an 
ordinary event. (Just here I am reminded 
of a little girlish, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, 
soft-fleshed creature who came to me once 
in a Mothers' Meeting, with a shy, 
whispered confession. Looking back, I am 
ashamed to recall: " Little simpleton, it is 
the common portion," was my crass, un- 
spoken thought. A common portion, truly, 
and the quintessence of the uncommon with 
its primal tap at one's own door, offering 
its draught which is both nectar and aloes 
in the one sipping!) 

Would you fear for your welcome, little 
sleeping earth-bud, if you knew the solemn 
fears and expectations I must swallow alone 

5 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

in the still night watches on my long 
via cruets? Of suffering, of any world-hurt, 
you cannot know in your coming, little 
mystery; you shall not know until — 
until — when would I be ready while the 
might of a woman's hands and will meant 
anything? 

And yet, what well-chosen ways would I 
lay for your feet if I had the power — 
trackless heights of might and daring, a 
clean, narrow path of duty, the clover- 
meadows of delight? He smiles, the Giver, 
shaking his head in reproof, and quietly 
taking the matter as from a greedy, clutch- 
ing child, out of my poor, ineffectual 
fingers. It is not for me to choose, and I 
sigh, but the sigh, after all, is largely of 
relief. How white the outlying fields are 
as I look from my window, watching for the 
long, empty, winding road to fill up with a 
man who (little as he guesses it) will be a 
father. The sun has gone down in a vast 
Chianti sea spanned by a bridge of Ruben's 
yellow thrown lightly over; some early 
stars come out in the westering sky, for- 
getting their sober-eyed vigil and shining 
like birthday candles. " Thou wilt light 
my candle." Yea, Lord, and amen! 

6 



HOPES AND FEARS 

I see the supple marsh-willows, softly 
red as with the sheen of mandarin silk, 
nodding on the broad bosom of the drift, 
though it is no ruthless wind that bends 
them so, only a gentle, insistent breath, a 
sort of universal sigh that might mean 
the longing of many women. Before they 
shall bend to the snows another winter, I 
shall know the cuddly feel of a downy 
head on my breast, God willing, the velvet 
touch of world-new, rose-petal cheeks. Oh, 
I have been sure of it for long, but I shall 
write it afresh on the still unyellowed 
leaves of the missal of my soul, and turn 
to it in the gold days and the dark (there 
are no " in-between " days, I find, in the 
first year of marriage): " God is good, yea, 
God is good, and His mercy endure th 
forever! " 

January 11. You would smile if you knew 
and could understand. Little Ego. I had 
not expected them to come to me so early 
in this history, the little " blue " demons of 
the situation. But there was something 
yesterday I came upon in a newspaper, a 
grisly bit of hospital lore — no, I shall not 
give the grim details to this Book of my 

7 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

Heart which is to be yours some day, only 
that I took the paper and scratched the 
nickel trimmings of my new kitchen stove 
with it diligently in vicarious revenge — 
to no effect. They stayed with me, the 
little " blue " demons, and camped around 
my pillow in battalions when I went to 
bed last night, so that I was obliged to 
fight as if I'd never heard of a Peace Com- 
mission, until I fell into a sort of light, rest- 
less sleep, I suppose, for the next thing I 
knew I seemed to be in a great, unlighted, 
empty-pewed church somewhere (a sort of 
feminine Robinson Crusoe on a spiritual 
desert island), and the minister was giving 
out the hymn. " Hymn number thirteen," 
I heard him say distinctly, with a certain 
deep, droning intonation familiar to my 
memory; " hymn number thirteen! " It 
rolled with sonorous effect through the dim 
aisles of that ghostly edifice. I stiffened 
intuitively. It was like a challenging sabre 
there in the dark. With dream-like agility, 
I slipped then into my lately doffed school- 
ma'am armor. " Thirteen," I piped aloud, 
eyeing my ministerial vis-a-vis with un- 
warranted severity from head to foot, 
"merely a number having no integral factors 

8 



HOPES AND FEARS 

except unity and itself; therefore prime! " 
Which pert and irrelevant finahty found me 
in a sitting posture, blinking vaguely into 
the unanswering gloom of the bedroom and 
clutching wildly at the unnecessary trous- 
seau fripperies at my throat. 

I was awake by this time, fully awake, 
I made sure of that, but — dire thought, 
fearful premonition, whipped into added 
activity by the insane iteration of a dead 
branch at the window creaking madly 
enough to inspire a second Beethoven's 
Symphony of Fate — what, oh what if 
Number Thirteen were a " funeral hymn " 
in the ancient hymnal out there under the 
" stand " in the sitting-room, along with the 
stuffed calico puppy and the abalone shell? 

I put one foot tentatively out of bed, at 
this, and the other was not long in follow- 
ing it, while I seized an old brown cloth 
shawl on the footboard (a certain deep- 
lying thrift has bade me bury my cream- 
colored cashmere one), and creaked forth 
in cautious pursuit of my doom. 

Cr-cr-ick! A match flared up crisply 
in the dark. Taut moment. Frantic search- 
ing. Relieved breath. " Antioch," a joy 
tune, as truly as I live! Spotty Sue, the 

9 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

cat of this domicile, who has the brain of a 
benevolent old lady stored away in that 
mottled head of hers, is my witness, for she 
came out of her box behind the stove and 
rubbed my knees with her plump sides, and 
licked her whiskers, and looked on with 
lambent yellow eyes in sisterly solicitude 
for which I was duly grateful. For it's a 
long, long way to Tipperary — and to 
Motherhood, my dear, as I couldn't help 
remembering, while I gathered Spotty Sue 
in a corner of my shawl and squatted be- 
fore the still red-embered fire for a posi- 
tively luxurious delving into further gloom. 
Deep meditation. What was the most ex- 
citing thing I'd ever heard among the old 
wives' tales a-plenty I had stored up seem- 
ingly against a possible famine in them? 
There was Aunt Marietta's masterpiece, for 
example. Aunt Marietta is that anomaly, 
a tragic fat woman, with a chronic grudge 
against life, and a voice with the downward 
plaint of an oboe. She says her fat's 
dropsical, not healthy, and she's a " mili- 
tant Feminist if need arise," whatever that 
may be — her own interpretation being 
liberally, the watchful enemy of man, of 
which species she is married to one of the 

10 



HOPES AND FEARS 

most harmless and doting specimens im- 
aginable.- Such a heart story as she related 
shut up with me in the orris-scented bed- 
room of her apartment on the drizzly 
afternoon of the day preceding my marriage! 
(Aunt Idella, who brought me up in a neigh- 
boring flat — I have no distinct memory of 
mother or father — had shifted the maternal 
prerogative just here to abler shoulders.) 
And what I did not know of the Machiavel- 
lian wiles of man, concluded the story in 
true Cassandra spirit (never mind what 
went before), I could discover later when 
I belonged to one of them body and soul, 
out there where the loneliness would get me, 
yes, get me! Aunt Marietta's arctic glance 
and thick white forefinger here transfixed 
me, and the lump in my throat cried, 
"Mother, mother, mother," just in blind 
instinct. Of course I let the absurdities I 
had heard go in one ear and out of the 
other, but they came back to me just the 
same that first night, the night the Miracle 
Man (my name for the head of this house- 
hold, dear) and I came into The Cabin for 
the first time alone together as man and 
wife, and I heard the grating of his key in 
the lock on the inside. 

11 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

I was all prepared to go minutely over 
the ground again, last night, when the 
bed creaked, and the Miracle Man came to 
life with an alarmed, "Phyllis"! (Phyllis 
of Lonesomehurst is his name for me); 
a chair upset somewhere in the dark in 
contact with a certain shin, I suspect; a 
word for which I once washed out Willy 
Beals* mouth popped out, and the next 
moment I was picked up bodily, much to 
the detriment of Spotty Sue, in masterly 
arms to which I still thrill in every fibre of 
me, and returned abruptly to my bed. 
The ways of women are strictly outside 
the seraglio of the wildest psychic journey- 
ings of this particular man, that's plain, and 
he makes no pretenses. But we have an 
understanding of our own, not to mention 
a language. ** Who cut the string and let 
you out of the package? " was his sole, 
sleepily muttered observation as he made his 
way back, implying that my degree of 
" loco " would hardly warrant my being at 
large. Is Aunt Marietta by any chance 
right about the proprietorial part of her 
indictment? 

. . . Interval for getting breakfast, 
at which function I of late appear minus a 

12 



HOPES AND FEARS 

lacey and much-labored-over cap, on the 
authority of a magazine sage who says 
that sensible men detest them. ... 

The Miracle Man searched my eye in 
mild hope of an explanation of last night's 
escapade, when he came in after chores 
(we have a horse, cow and twenty-five 
chickens)— and got none. Having a curios- 
ity all your own, or I am strangely mis- 
taken, you will want to know how he looked 
sitting there at the breakfast table op- 
posite me. 

Take him in a geographic way and call 
him the province of RoUin Barney (which 
should give you some little clew right there) : 
he is bounded on the north by a thick 
thatch of russet hair (color by courtesy), 
in which such weak-backed articles of a 
feeble civilization as combs and brushes 
merely lose themselves hopelessly; on the 
south by a pair of able feet that a police- 
man might covet; on the east and west re- 
spectively by a patently useful arm termi- 
nating in each case in a generous, hairy- 
backed, well-weathered hand (I never 
could have loved a white-handed man). 
Relief — Features rough enough to warrant 
a belief in their volcanic origin; mouth 

13 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

that bespeaks the temperamental Irish- 
man; eyes deep gray, with an exquisite 
tinge of heHotrope, black-fringed and in- 
sisting " you don't mean it " to the pugna- 
cious set of the jaw. Climate — Hot, cold, 
mild and frigid, frequently in rapid succes- 
sion and with little or no warning. Area — 
large. Shape — All that could be desired, in 
spite of Aunt Idella's unflattering classifica- 
tion, raw-boned. 

Such is Rollin B. Barney of the hamlet of 
Next-to-Nowhere, plus a gray sweater and 
corduroys and a heart-fabric of cloth-of- 
gold weave in a body as clean as that of a 
pink cherub, newly descended. He's a 
caveman, farmer in a small way (we've 
ten acres with a four-room cabin perched 
in the middle), and village carpenter for 
the rest, though " building contractor " was 
what I stammered when I met June Crad- 
dock in the city at Christmas on a shopping 
trip, and she quizzed me. (June's a former 
Normal School girl, now a handsome 
woman with an " air " and a certain 
critical, surviving, oblique glance before 
which I used to cringe even in our school- 
days.) In my perturbation — I was distantly 
debating the advisability of reminding June 

14 



HOPES AND FEARS 

that the Man whose birthday we were cele- 
brating had been a village carpenter, too — 
I juggled so clumsily with the " contract " 
part of it that it's come to me since, that 
maybe that characteristic look of hers only 
meant in this instance that she was wonder- 
ing how I'd manage to shrink the man of 
my choice after so staunchly maintaining 
that he was " all wool." 

At this point in my cogitations this 
morning, the Miracle Man pushed back his 
chair, and came over and rumpled my 
hair, which he praises like a typical Mr. 
Younghusband, and began to sing an absurd 
little ditty about my eyes (really my most 
respectable feature, if that cracked and 
dimming little hand-glass of mine is to be 
trusted). But I know you, Mr. Rollin 
Barney, and what you can't achieve with 
a pensive or pleading look, you attempt 
with blandiloquence. Nevertheless, for all 
your blarney, you're an ideal partner with 
which to work out that little problem that 
is troubling so many heads: Love -j- love = ? 
You'd use that able body of yours to fight 
for me like an aborigine if you had to; 
and I — I — well, wait and see. June has 
promised to come to us with the spring- 

15 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

time, and if she does, and turns the dogs of 
her superiority on you when you fall short 
of the requirements of the social decalogue 
that is her fetich, I foresee that you may 
be the first to need a defender. 



16 



CHAPTER II 

Lifted Curtains 

January 12. Today I have walked to the 
end of the village road, incidentally un- 
folding my viewpoint of it as unfold the 
withered shoots of the Resurrection Plant 
of the cedars of Palestine in a bowl of 
water. Viewed in the rough, Next-to- 
Nowhere is a broken, hillside village, a 
handful of dingy, mutely expectant chimney 
pots, with the grayness of a stone-quarry 
at one end and a wee, neglected, tipsy 
tombstoned cemetery at the other. Add to 
that, in a clump, a squat yellow blacksmith 
shop, the charred ruins of a creamery, a 
clattering, unpainted blank-looking grist 
mill, a blue mill-pond, bluer for the black 
crows stalking on the ice, and you have the 
picture complete, save for the neutral strips 
of pastel-shaded interspersing whiteness 
brooded over by an unearthly quiet, un- 
broken save for the occasional hollow 
yawping of a hound or the low, liquid 
gutturals of a flock of doves, " Asleep, 

17 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

asleep, asleep, asleep/' True, little dun- 
and-purple feathered visionaries, true. Yet 
life, life, life, sweet, strangely sweet kernel 
of that dark, smooth, hard-shelled nut. 
Eternal Mystery, after all, are you any less 
agog in Next-to-Nowhere than in the wide, 
perfervid human haunts beyond? What 
matters it intrinsically to God's manifold 
reel picture-play if it be witnessed by a 
feathered audience or the elect of earth? 

These were the questions that met me 
today at Mary's — "Asking Mary's" — at 
the end of the road. " Asking Mary " 
somehow just escapes being a village 
character. Perhaps she is, as she is said 
to be, " queer." But she is a picture un- 
deniably in her own doorway, with the 
chuckling, circling pigeons over her head — 
a tall, straight white-birch of a woman, 
with snowy hair at fifty, and sloe-black eyes 
with the mirage of a thorn-crown in their 
velvet depths. 

" Where's Alice? " begins " Asking Mary," 
her long, slim, listless hands folded before 
her, a peculiar quiescence, a sort of mask- 
like passivity in her manner. 

She has put the same question to every 
soul in the shadow of her door for the 

18 



LIFTED CURTAINS 

past fifteen years, I am told; always with 
no answer. " Asking Mary " does not 
expect an answer evidently, for straight- 
way her sensitive lips curve slightly in a 
smile of greeting, and she is, to all intents 
and purposes, her normal, if somewhat 
puzzling, self again. I have pondered much 
over her in the little while I have known 
her. What a stretching of mental leg 
muscles it demands, to be sure, to see over 
the bounding line of one's own little garden- 
plat of existence. I have gone so far in 
callous days as to call her, to myself, a 
selfish woman, marring the life of the man 
whose name she bears, intruding an un- 
sightly grief-scar on every chance comer. 

Today it was different. A long shaft 
of sunshine lay across the little room I 
entered, touching alike her patrician features 
and the scarlet glory of the geraniums over 
which she puttered. And in a moment, as 
with a complementary flood of inner 
radiance, dear Mary, I knew, I knew! Real, 
warm, dimpled, living baby arms around 
your neck one day, and the next the cold- 
ness of clay and an empty chalice! It 
had been only a story, a common story, to 
me, before, the sudden loss of your one 

19 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

babe, little Alice, so many years ago. But 
now I have the key, and I know. And on 
impulse I knelt where you sat, and whis- 
pered to you my secret, my precious secret 
that I have shared with no other human 
soul, so far, and that I would have thought 
to share least of all with you, " Asking 
Mary." And I know you understood, for 
there stole into your poor face a lovely 
softness, and your questioning eyes so shone 
with a sort of reflected light that I was put 
in mind of a little, long-deserted house 
over the way taking to itself the semblance 
of lighted windows with the last bright 
rays of day, while the more fortunate ones 
about it yellowed mellowly from within 
into pools of joyous human contentment. 

Whatever your vision, or whatever mine, 
for that moment we stood upon sacredly- 
flowering common ground, " Asking Mary," 
you and I. And the angel of the An- 
nunciation, bearing aloft her white lily, 
smiled. 

January 13. Behold Next- to-No where in 
Icelandic caprice, playing the ancient game 
of Drop-the-Mercury with John Frost and 
losing to him recklessly to the tune of 

20 



LIFTED CURTAINS 

innumerable small creakings swelled by oc- 
casional " booms " of The Cabin's protesting 
timbers. Envision The Cabin itself, a tiny, 
stranded raft in a polar waste, with its 
leaping wood-fire, its homely smells of 
homelier food, its friendly and over- familiar 
cat-genius, its cracked and chilled array of 
" handed-down " china. Yes, Little Heart 
o' Mine and Marrow of my Wifehood, I 
had not meant to lift crudely the curtain 
on my Lares and Penates just yet, but — 
to whom may I speak my heart, if not to 
you? And right here, since we are already 
growing cozily intimate, I want to say to 
you, forgive me if my ideas unfold them- 
selves with the erratic movements of fireflies 
in June; it is not an attempt to be 
" Browningesque " on my part, nor yet an 
effort to cudgel you into the belief that 
you are to own a brilliant mother. It is 
only a little harmless maternal light- 
headedness due to a diet with a decided 
salt pork and brown bread leaning, and 
trying to shut out a vision unbidden of 
beefsteak and hot-house grapes. Life, you 
see, has its buttered side — and another, 
which brings me to a delicate point: did 
you choose us, or did we choose you, or, 

21 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

better still, did God choose the three 
of us? 

Happily the shoulders of Deity are 
broad — broad enough, I trust, to warrant 
us in leaving the matter there while we 
proceed with our intimate, worldly-minded 
trivial ties. 

It's just a low, white, gray-shuttered 
tiny-porched bit of house on a tree-clad 
slope you're coming to, dear (nobody has 
taught us to say "bungalow" out here), 
but it's ours, thank God, every stick and 
stone of it, work of the Miracle Man's own 
hands. 

Enter, guest of my fancy, this morning. 
Here's our parlor, reception room, living 
room in one, known in Next-to-Nowhere by 
the antiquated name of sitting-room — 
beam-ceiled, the rose-flowered chintz hang- 
ings and tall, pink-shaded candles on the 
mantel my fondest decorative hopes blos- 
somed into fruition. As for the other trap- 
pings of adornment and usefulness — don't 
smile — they mean well, but they are as 
yet a motley, unsifted assembly, staring 
strangely at each other in mutual concern — 
the Miracle Man's trophies of field and 
stream, the braided rugs and walnut 

22 



LIFTED CURTAINS 

" stand " and " what-not " that were his 
mother's (she, too, dear soul, Hke my own 
saint-mother, is a traveler to the Far 
Country, and her family widely scattered); 
the childish tokens of Susy Brown and Willy 
Beals of my teaching days; the hunting 
accoutrements and oddly assorted books, 
the red and white mitcheline spreads in the 
twin bedrooms adjoining, the generous 
scattering of fur-skins on the floors, so that 
sometimes I feel like an Indian bride; the 
shining new stove and singing aluminum 
teakettle of the wee kitchen. "My own 
kitchen" — words to conjure with! Did 
ever a woman die satisfied without having 
been able to say them? For me, I would 
rather hear the song of that kettle on the 
hearth, as a daily thing, than to have 
heard Sembrich sing the Casta Diva in 
Parisian grand opera. 

Not but that one's own kitchen imposes 
its peculiar trials. Exempli gratia j take this 
warm, brown, spicy, sodden thing on the 
table, which was originally intended for a 
ginger cake. It " fell," even as Kosciusko 
in the cause of freedom, and with the 
lumpy icing on its caving surface, now ap- 
pears, in fascinating ensemble, a marshy 

23 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

graveyard in miniature. Strange, is it not, 
that with the effort I have been required 
to put forth in higher mathematics and 
several " ologies " for which I have no 
use nor aptitude, I have been left to my 
instincts in the fundamental needs of my 
calling? 

Listen! That's the crunching step of the 
Miracle Man on the porch, or I shall never 
believe my ears again. He's ruddy with the 
cold, and as hungry as a bear, I'll venture 
to say. A man, I am warned, has a devil 
that lives in his stomach. Adios, guest of 
my fancy, adios! I am fleeing like a 
squaw who has burned the venison. 



24 



CHAPTER III 
Ups and Downs 

January 14. Alone in The Cabin all day 
today with two resurrected magazines and 
Spotty Sue. (The Miracle Man is attend- 
ing an auction, the chief male diversion 
hereabouts, it appears.) Was it a day, or 
a thousand years? Every minute of it, this 
is the rock of Gibraltar against which I 
have been beating my head: the " inevita- 
bleness " of this thing that has come to me; 
I have bitten off a large chunk of life, 
and must chew and digest it somehow. 

As for you, Mrs. Spotty Sue, after all the 
years I have been your mistress, I have 
discovered at last the inmost desire of the 
cat-soul behind those opal-yellow eyes of 
yours; it is that I may one day turn 
prestidigitator and thereafter draw an end- 
less succession of fresh sausages out of a 
silk hat for you. 

Heigh-ho! with the magazines it was 
little better. What marvelous, fairy-tale- 
like stories, bubbling and flecking like new 

25 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

wine in the cask of man's hope, reach us 
now and then in our cataclysmal men- 
tal darkness on the blue edge of Things- 
that-be! 

Twilight Sleep! Strange, iridescent, ver- 
milion-hued hope-bubble from over the 
seas! I reached out my arms to it this 
afternoon as a babe to the topmost bauble 
on the Christmas tree, and lo, even as I 
lifted them, the bauble eluded me and 
swayed into the shadow of alleged disre- 
pute! What was it the other magazine, 
contrary-minded, had to offer — Ribemont, 
Dessaigne and detoxicated morphine? Bub- 
bles both, or a little leaven somewhere which 
shall leaven the whole lump? 

Resignation! It cannot matter to us 
yet — to us who travel under the mystic 
spell that lays its hands on the souls of 
those on the Road to Motherhood in the 
fastnesses of the wilderness. 

Our country practitioner, from up among 
the hills, an aged, long-haired man of vast 
deeds and vaster simplicity, pulls down the 
corners of his mouth, and shakes his head. 
For him, 

" God smites his hands together, 

And strikes out a soul as a spark, 

26 



UPS AND DOWNS 

Into the organized glory of things, 
From the deeps of the dark." 

Is that the essence of it all, when all is 
told? Are there compensations perhaps in 
living beyond the touch of teeming haunts, 
and straining unaided at the meanings of 
life? Says the Koran: Nothing can befall 
us but what God hath destined for us. 
Hark to the hard, reiterated philosophy of 
my unsleeping, uncompromising kitchen 
clock which has been ticking it out for 
hours now: ''Whatever is to be, will be. 
Whatever is to be, will be." 

January i 5. 4 a.m.! I have just silenced 
that insistently ticking kitchen clock, philos- 
ophy and all. . . . The dusty bats of 
night are still astir in my brain. ... I 
am writing this to try to preserve my 
sanity. 

My Miracle Man has been sick, very, 
very sick, owing, so he thinks, to some 
probably tainted canned beef used in the 
luncheon sandwiches at the auction yester- 
day. 

I suppose I have " fussed " over him; 
Vm not sure but that I wailed, and made a 

27 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

maudlin fool of myself when the attack 
was at its worst. At any rate, here is my 
punishment: he got up as soon as he was 
able, and retreated with cloistral dignity 
and wobbly and uncertain step into the 
spare bedroom, locking the door after him. 
Little Ego, ought I to batter that door 
down with my fists? That's the problem 
confronting me now — me who thought the 
problems of marriage were solved with a 
handful of fleecy frills and the continual 
smile of the Mona Lisa or the Shoe-Bill 
of the White Nile. I feel like a child who 
has strayed into the woods with a Teddy 
Bear in its arms and met the real article! 

January 16. Sunday. " Richard is himself 
again" — with an apology in his eye, not to 
mention Richard's wife with a frown on 
her brow, which says, in effect, I have 
married a man with a heart writ in Saxon, 
and the script has become hierophantic 
under my very gaze. I am defrauded. 

Tonight we have walked to church, a 
distance of three miles, holding hands most 
of the way and swinging them in the fash- 
ion commonly pictured in the Babes in the 
Wood, our old horse Chu-chu (named in 

28 



UPS AND DOWNS 

irony for Brete Harte's steed) being indis- 
posed. 

It was wonderfully light all the way, with 
a big, blonde, aloof Norse goddess moon 
and her retinue of stars, and our steady, 
even tread was marked by the creaking of 
the snow, our blood sang, and our shadows 
trotted with us on joyous, impalpable feet. 
(I have needed no teaching in the love of 
open spaces. Was it not Seneca who said, 
"The gods are naked and in the open"?) 
So silent were we for all that gloriously 
etheric atmosphere that we might have been 
a make-believe family out there under the 
unplumbed skies. What is the mysterious 
alchemy that weaves hearts together so 
closely as to bar the need of speech — 
shared thought, common emotion? Here 
was the road of our sublimated courtship 
in the days when I presided over a little 
school in an adjoining district, and the 
Miracle Man " kept bach " in The Cabin, 
only that then it was full of wild rose and 
honeysuckle surprises and the stream under 
the bridge was gurgling like a happy babe. 

Are there changes in us as vast, too? 
I admit that I could not again walk quite 
so absurdly upon air. I am not even sure 

29 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

that I want to; and, as for him, there is no 
mistaking his deHght in the serene and solid 
jog which he has comfortably resumed, nor 
the thankful dexterity with which he has 
drawn his head out from under that burden- 
some thing, at best, to man — the lover's yoke. 

(You should see him here by the fire as 
I write, to make sure, his feet on the table, 
his beloved " Wild Woods and Water- 
ways " close under his nose, his pipe send- 
ing out blue wreaths that would do credit 
to a chimney.) 

In the tiny church the Christmas decora- 
tions were still in evidence, and the air 
was laden with the soothing smell of dying 
arbor-vitae. " Little Ego," I murmured, 
as I took my place, " this is none other 
than the House of God. How I want you 
sometime to know the comfort of it, the 
quiet peace, the unutterable blessing of 
His love, the staunch assurance, ' Lo, I 
am with you*! Without these things, what 
a frail, crackling, empty shell is this thing 
we call earthly existence! ' I am come that 
ye might have life, and have it more 
abundantly ' — that was the text of the 
sermon. Life more abundant, what can it 
mean to me now above one thing? " 

30 



UPS AND DOWNS 

Far, far away, I seemed to be listening to 
a little voice, and sometimes it laughed, 
and sometimes it wailed, and again it burst 
forth in the lilt of a childish song, so that 
desire took hold of me keen to painfulness, 
an Amfortas lance touching the core of my 
being. " Little, little part of me," as the 
Scotch say, " I canna get my breath for 
wan tin' ye." So does the grosser substance 
of the flesh lay its hands profanely on the 
finer clay of the spirit. 

I am brought to a full stop in my narra- 
tive. I ponder. I have cause to ponder. 
What were the various points in the ser- 
mon? I hang my head in shame. I have 
sensed it only as an atmosphere. However, 
" a verse," says George Herbert, " may 
catch him who a sermon flies." 

January 20, " Sweet, sweet, sweet," 
shrilly observes the fat, old, knowing, 
black-bibbed sparrow in his misty outlook 
on the world from the pear-tree this morn- 
ing. 

" Right-o, little old wiseacre! " I say as 
the flute-of-Pan sound rises above the merry 
clink of the Miracle Man's hammer in his 
workshop hard by. We're a narrow lot, 

31 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

anyway, we folk of family, always ready to 
say Pippa's " God's in His Heaven, all's 
right with the world," when things are well 
with us and ours. " Right-o! Sweet, 
sweet, sweet! " I put behind me a picture 
conjured up by a pitilessly matter-of-fact 
war-scribe as I say it, of countless far-away 
babes in a war- torn world, who must learn 
someway to write their life-stories in de- 
vastated places, and close my ears to the 
clanking of the chains of human limitation. 
After all, the harshest adversity has never 
been strong enough to still the solemn, joy- 
ful, world-wide chorus of the unborn: 
" We want to be; we want to be! " It 
is the pitiful proof of their confidence in 
us who are, a confidence we futilely try to 
justify with the shining bars of fancy with 
which we hedge in their first, believing, 
dream-fringed years, and dazzle their new 
and trustful eyes. Meanwhile the crushing 
Juggernaut of Reality rolls on, with the 
sole injunction: "Stand out of the way, 
Dreamer! " 

That there is discretion in obedience 
who shall gainsay, yet stay — stay! I 
close my eyes and listen to the dripping of 
the winter rain upon the roof. To me it 

32 



UPS AND DOWNS 

becomes, with a single, yearning, eager 
dream-shift, the ecstatic patter of tender, 
pink-dyed baby feet, and I know a surfeit 
of happiness Hke a wee boy with his hands 
all over honey. I shall have to bear up 
under it, somehow; the reality, it is possible, 
may transcend the dream. 

Babes of war and war-babes (we learned 
to say it with a distinction on the dis- 
covery that '' Single men in barracks 
didn't turn out plaster saints"), you come 
very near to us in far-reaching fancy. 
Thank God, the elastic, infinite plan is 
big enough for every mother's chick of 
us in the universe, counting none of us 
low or contraband or nameless! Enfold us 
more closely, immaculate valance of the 
Eternal Trust that gives fresh life into 
our keeping. Sometime there shall dawn 
for us a larger day — too large, let us 
hope, for archaic prejudice and the fetter- 
ing or heaping of contumely on the in- 
nocent. Why remind the golden orchards 
of Pamona of their dung-hill origin or 
our violet -vales -to -be of the dun-hued, 
mothering leaf- mold? World in the mire 
of things that offend, come forth, come 
forth! 

33 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

January 27. A week without a word 
to you, Book of My Heart, a blessed week 
of snowy isolation, quiet as an unruffled 
pool, with 

" A world of care without, 
A world of strife shut out, 
A world of love shut in," 

and its own special bit of upsetting history 
to finish it. 

Came a neighbor, Peter Ricketty, from 
the Hollow yesterday, a little crab of a 
man in ragged boots and a patchy 'coon- 
skin coat, gaunt, unshaven, considerably 
the worse for whiskey he had probably 
procured on a circuitous route, and with 
something clearly on his mind. 

He shifted from one foot to the other, 
with the pale, fleeting, fatuous smile of an 
infant ..with the colic, until finally it came 
forth ..with amazing reluctance. There's a 
new baby at his house (the ninth child in 
line!) "An' would somebody — hie — be 
pleased to do somethin' for the Missus, th' 
two oldes' girls bein' in Cull Prairie 
workin' out." 

I was pleased, since I was plainly elected 
to be so — and afraid. However, vigor- 

34 



UPS AND DOWNS 

ously calling upon that remnant of courage I 
keep in moral cold storage, I packed a 
basket, left a note for the Miracle Man 
asking him to meet me in the evening, when 
I expected him to return from a trip to 
town, and fared forth in the sled with the 
smilingly good-natured and unsteady Peter 
Ricketty behind that spavined, parrot- 
mouthed, maltreated, gray nag of his. 
And the runners whined painfully over the 
icy blueness of the hills and the driver and 
I in turn " blew " our aching fingers, and 
" we gaed and we gaed and we gaed," even 
as Gooseygander. 

My dear, my dear, of all the Augean 
abodes, Peter Ricketty 's, with the hollow- 
eyed, tubercular-looking cows sticking dirty 
heads out of the shed-like end of the ram- 
bling, tumble-down structure, must bear the 
palm! 

A half dozen youngsters, rough-haired 
and thin-necked as Hooligan's nephews of 
comic fame, and seemingly all of an age, 
flocked through the kitchen door at our 
arrival, together with an impertinently his- 
sing gander, and as suddenly slunk into 
oblivion at the sight of a stranger. 

Inside, festoons of long-dead flies, smoky 

35 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

residue and various dingy spatterings hung 
upon the low and tottery walls like the 
shadows of a Rembrandt (my apologies to 
the master) ; a vile mop, hung on a nail 
beside the stove, oozed viler water; un- 
washed clothes and dishes grimaced at each 
other from every corner; the grim, despon- 
dent demon of dirt held the whole place by 
the throat. And there on a bed against the 
kitchen wall, under a covering of filthy 
rags, was the woman and her baby — the 
girl-baby who has made her d6but in life 
in a dirt-clogged shack that a self-respecting 
dog would shun, and must draw her sus- 
tenance from a slattern wretch who has 
forgotten the meaning of the word hope 
if she ever knew it and is now too ambition- 
less to shake the dead vermin from herself. 

All this in swift, hot judgment for which 
the next moment brought repentance. She 
was so white, so thin, this miserable storm- 
petrel with her big, pale, vacuous eyes and 
scant wisps of unkempt hair, and there — 
there it was, the one touch of Heaven and 
Gethsemane that makes the whole mother- 
world kin. 

I wanted to pray or cry or run away like 
a coward, I wasn't certain which. I was 

36 



UPS AND DOWNS 

sick, sick, with the nausea of sin at my 
stomach and the knowledge of my share in 
that sin and its immutable penalty. (Why 
do we sit and fold our hands, like sleepy 
children in the sun, with even one rum- 
steeped Peter Ricketty at our door?) 

The baby, though the merest midget, 
seemed well and likely to thrive. I noted 
a smile on the mother's face as she made 
mention of the fact — difficultly, for she 
has a painful impediment in her speech. 
Beyond that, she showed, for the greater 
part, only an impenetrable apathy, not 
entirely due to illness, I judge. 

Altogether, it was a fire-letter day in my 
calendar, and much of the time I did 
battle with my tears, and once I laughed 
hysterically when my host (who made 
frequent demands upon a bottle secreted 
about his person) drew his chair up to the 
table, on which I had managed to place 
some kind of a meal, and avidly attacked 
a boiled egg without removing the shell, to a 
shrill shout of amusement from the motley 
group of shyly approaching children. 

The Miracle Man was late in coming, as 
he is bound to be when driving Chu-chu, 
and already the shroudy, cold, slate-colored 

37 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

light of early evening was settling over the 
Hollow when we said our adieus and set 
forth our plans for a future call. She 
actually clung to me in parting, that 
apathetic woman; I can feel the clutch of 
her fingers yet. The hysteria had left me, 
but my blood was still riotous enough so 
that now I feel shame at it in this cooler 
moment, and I prayed in fierce silence 
as if — was it as if holding up the Source of 
Things at the point of a gun? 

In the meantime, for a distance of two 
miles, the Miracle Man sat with mouth 
clamped mute. 

Finally, " It's a great country," he said, 
whimsically, as he always does, in the 
tension of a situation, when beggared for 
language, " Next-to-Nowhere's the capitol!" 



3S 



CHAPTER IV 
Behind the Scenes 

February 1. In the parlance of Next-to- 
Nowhere, we " have the wood-sawers," as 
evinced by the pungent odor of gasoline in 
our back- yard and the intermittent "z-zip" 
of the engine, which spells for the feminine 
part of this household, in letters large 
enough to adorn the horizon, dinner today 
for six men — six, to employ the weighty 
repetition of a circus poster. 

Cissie Ricketty, who is nineteen and the 
eldest of the Ricketty children, and who 
" goes out by the day," has come to help 
me, offering her services gratuitously, a 
fact that has touched me greatly. With 
her young, plump figure, olive cast of skin, 
inscrutable expression and foreign-seeming 
slant of eye, she might be an Ibibio girl 
from the fatting-room, or a young Japanese 
woman freely wielding the broom out there 
in the kitchen. Her dress of anilin pink 
calico is grimy at the neckband, and the 
skirt, probably by an encounter with a wire 

39 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

fence, a liberal interpretation of the deca- 
dent slit model. Also, the olfactory evi- 
dence of her presence is indubitable. But 
she moves with the sure directness of a 
Greek drama, and she isn't stupid, nor yet 
inefficient, in which she resembles neither 
parent. Responsibility has been hers from 
her ragged infancy, this young, straight 
dark-browed acolyte of life, and she has 
been obliged to meet it somehow. So 
nature adjusts her errors. However, her 
uncertain temper is reflected in the erratic 
movements of Spotty Sue, and she swears 
forgetfully in a voice of dulcet clarity when 
annoyed or puzzled. The vicissitudes of a 
varied career have added a piquancy, to 
say the least of it, to her vocabulary in 
other ways. In answer to an inquiry con- 
cerning her mother, she observed artlessly, 
" Oh, ma's all right, only " with a naive 
tapping of her forehead, *' nobody home; 
see? " 

For dinner we are to have mashed 
potatoes, salt pork a la every day (there 
is a fortune awaiting the woman who will 
make a really new dish of it), cold slaw, 
baked beans and pumpkin pie. (Sure and 
it might be worse, as Cissie consolingly re- 

40 



BEHIND THE SCENES 

marks.) And may the kindly if elusive 
genius that presides over good dinners 
abide with us for the nonce. 

6 P.M. Little Ego, little Ego, how could 
I ever have imagined that this ridiculous 
little teacher-barque of mine was fit for 
the high seas of domesticity? Such a mess 
as I have made of this day! It began 
(whisper) it began with the harmless 
looking feat of slawing the cabbage, some- 
thing in which the veriest imbecile may be 
trusted ordinarily, but in which procedure 
I managed to give for scriptural measure a 
neat little portion of my forefinger. 

Did Mrs. Casablanca desert her post for 
a trifle like that? 

By no means. She stayed by and hid the 
aforesaid finger in her blouse as the Spartan 
youth concealed the fox — that is, till she 
saw the blood and fell off her chair like a 
miserable little cotton-wool woman in a 
foolish faint, and was rescued and resusci- 
tated by the gallant Cissie, and put on the 
couch perforce for two mortal hours, where 
only the mental vision of four yellow pies 
on the pantry shelf, passing before her 
mind's eye in comforting review, kept hope 
in her body. 

41 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

Cissie, the treasure, made small bones of 
the matter; said nothing, at my request, 
and served dinner, in which I joined her, 
promptly at noon. (By the by, how those 
men from the keen out-of-doors do bolt 
their food!) What should I have done 
without her, I ask myself as I lie here to- 
night with the Book of My Heart and a cup 
of cocoa for my consolation, and listen to 
her and the Miracle Man rattling the sup- 
per dishes, he chuckling deeply at some 
thrust from her and pretending to chase 
her about the kitchen with a tin pan. 

" Is he of any use to you, at all? " I 
asked her once when the glimmer of her 
pink appeared momentarily at the sitting- 
room door. 

" Of the same use is a rainbow in Tor- 
ment," was her laconic response, with a 
flirt of her dish-rag. 

February 2. They are taking our traditions 
away from us one by one, leaving only the 
skeptic's smile in their place. What will 
be left for you. Babe o* Mine, I wonder, to 
say nothing of your children and your 
children's children. As a wee girl, I used to 
like to think on this day of days of the 

42 



BEHIND THE SCENES 

ground-hog, a creature of which I had a 
very definite impression (in my imagina- 
tion), peering out of his hole in search of a 
certain hairy furtive Shadow, banished by 
the modern child to the limbo of " has- 
beens." Even on a sunny morning, I re- 
joiced in his presumable joy in the game, 
despite the untoward dallying of spring so 
forecasted. 

Mr. Ground-hog, I still half suspect you 
of being abroad this moment, and laughing 
in your sleeve. Of one thing I'm morally 
certain: You'll not see your shadow today 
— not here. There's a fog over these hills 
like a draping of great gray scarfs of tulle. 
Poor Spotty Sue, the only one to venture 
forth in it on an investigation tour, as a 
reward for her pains, got into a trap set in 
the woodpile by the Miracle Man for a 
weasel that has been making depredations 
on his chicken-house. As good fortune 
would have it, he discovered her almost at 
once and released her, while, in complete 
bewilderment, she fought him with cat- 
fury. She does not understand what has 
hurt her, nor why her body fails to obey 
her bidding. It is heartrending to see the 
mute question in her eyes when she holds 

43 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

up her paw with the little drops of blood 
spotting the snow. 

" Pusheen, pusheen," soothes the Miracle 
Man, over and over, binding the hurt with 
a marvelous gentleness to which, from him, 
I am no stranger. 

Babe- to-come, if you are a woman-child, 
among other of my dearest wishes, I want 
you one day to know the tender strength 
of rough man-hands. 

February 4. Drifted down from a clear 
sky last night that rara avis at The Cabin 
— a visitor, a boyhood friend of the Mir- 
acle Man's from over the hills, with a 
glowing tale of fish beauties caught through 
the ice at Lake Phantom, fifteen miles from 
here, and a proposition to make the trip 
today with team and buckboard. 

Did my Miracle Man, who has seemed a 
bit dull of late (or have I only fancied it?), 
come to life? I wish you could have seen 
him with the shine in his eyes, the tawny 
red in his cheeks, to match his hair (there, 
I've let the cat out of the bag), and the 
vigor in his stride. 

Today, without him. The Cabin has been 
so creepily still, I've been playing I'm 

44 



BEHIND THE SCENES 

the Captive Princess in the far-off land of 
Bombaloo, and have reached the point 
where the captor witch declares: "The 
matter is: I would like to have your heart 
to eat." I am not sure but that she has 
it. Anyhow, the great lump of loneliness in 
it is sure to choke her. 

The wind has been playing an un- 
finished symphony all day, seething in the 
cedars. The snow is off in great patches; 
the slush ankle-deep. Perhaps that is why 
Cissie Ricketty, who was to stay with me, 
has not come. . . . 

Positive — lonely; comparative — lone- 
lier; superlative — loneliest! 

The wind is rising, turning to a sob 
and getting on my nerves. A host of small 
fears tug at my heart. Puttering about the 
house doesn't help. I've baked cookies for 
supper (moderately successful ones); it 
takes so long to cut them in the various 
shapes. And this doily with the violets I've 
embroidered consumed four hours, blessed 
thing; yet such is the state of my mind, 
both sides of it look like the wrong side! 

Later. The table is set, and supper cool- 
ing in the dishes. Chu-chu has had his 

45 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

feed, which he was in doubt about taking 
from me, lifting up his head and whinny- 
ing for his master. Mooley, even, has had 
to submit to my clumsy ministrations. 
I tried to whistle at my tasks, but I've 
a fancy old Harpocrates with his finger on 
his mouth has me in a spell. The wind is 
still rising with a clattering of the shutters 
and a rattling of the doors. The Cabin 
lurches like a ship in a heavy sea, and 
shakes like Messina. I've watched the road 
one way for Cissie and the other way for 
the Miracle Man (whom I expected before 
nightfall) till I'm as divided in my mind as 
the traveler trying to blow hot and cold 
at the same time. At last I've given up 
Cissie. A woman's life is nine-tenths wait- 
ing. Patience! It's a long drive and the 
roads difficult. 

10 o'clock. He isn't here yet. I haven't 
the heart to get away from this window, 
where I've been sitting for three hours see- 
ing nothing for the outer wall of dark. 
And how I've prayed! I've had so much, 
so infinitely much of good, dear God, be- 
yond my deserts, but I shall have to ask 
one thing more. Bring my Miracle Man 

46 



BEHIND THE SCENES 

home safely. If — if — ! Oh, what a terrible 
gap could occur in the ranks of one's 
largest, taken-for-granted blessings in one 
little day's span! I often forget to sing my 
paean of thanksgiving when I'm happy, 
but stress of any kind invariably unseals 
my lips in a plea (constrained by my sense 
of the sin of omission). 

Unhappily, I'm not a so-called competent 
woman; neither have I the resourcefulness 
commonly credited to the " school-ma'am " 
make-up, otherwise, doubtlessly, I suppose 
I'd " do something," though I'm sure that's 
untranslatable in this case into anything 
definite. The last task, mixing the 
" sponge " for bread, is finished, and the 
yeasty smell is filling the room. The kitchen 
fire has gone out, and the place looks as 
desolate as a wind-swept desert. 

Midnight — and after! The old clock 
tolled out the hour some minutes ago. 
I take my pen and my little book to com- 
pel my fingers, shaking with cold and 
nervousness, to steady themselves. I do not 
know whether I am worried now, or not; 
I can't feel any more. I'm just tired, un- 
believably tired and sick at heart, I try 

47 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

to pray again, but my soul is a blank, and 
God seems a million-million miles away. 

Every time the back door rattles (Next- 
to-Nowhere etiquette is decidedly opposed 
to locks), a different vision unrolls itself 
in my vivid fancy. Sometimes it's a grin- 
ning tramp with an ax in his hand; some- 
times an escaped madman, doing the latest 
thing in waltz steps; sometimes it is a 
burglar desperate enough to come to Next- 
to-Nowhere; sometimes, even, the Miracle 
Man himself, drunk and shouting evilly. 
(I've never known him to touch a drop of 
the stuff, but then I haven't known him 
" for always.") 

Spotty Sue, to be sure, is a good friend, 
but her disposition is too affectionate. If 
any of the aforesaid happened in, she'd 
try to win his heart by rubbing her sides 
on his trouser-legs. 

I've got right to the point where I don't 
care who knows it: I'm going to creep into 
bed with my clothes on, and cover up my 
head! 

February 5. I am feeling very small and 
shamed and haggard by daylight. I am 
not even very sure but that I am a Mrs. 

48 



BEHIND THE SCENES 

Henpeck. I suggested this to the Miracle 
Man in a wee, small voice like that at which 
the prophet hid his face in his mantle, 
when I finally dared to meet his eyes across 
the breakfast table this morning, and he 
answered magnanimously that he had lately 
read somewhere on scientific authority that 
a henpeck had never been known to cause a 
fatal hemorrhage yet. 

It was half past twelve when he arrived 
last night. At the first sound of his step 
in the house (after all, nobody v/alks in the 
least like him), I sprang from the bed with 
my hair streaming down my back, and flew 
at him, candle in hand, with a barked de- 
mand for an explanation. 

He blinked in the candlelight like a great, 
surprised owl for a minute, looking at me as 
if he had just discovered me and was at a loss 
for a label. Then he leaned back and burst 
into a huge laugh and began to prance around 
the kitchen, holding up his bag of fish (really 
fine ones) for my inspection. This failing 
to have the desired result, he threw down 
the bag and lifted me off my feet, demand- 
ing to know " why my mountains were 
always molehills, and why I wasn't in bed 
— he'd expected to find Cissie and m^e 

49 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

asleep on one pillow as snug as two bugs in 
a rug " (an appropriate figure in connection 
with that verminous, malodorous child)! 

Finally, he settled down to the rational 
part of his story — how the trip one way 
had taken four hours over the bad roads; 
how hungry he and Harker were. (Jack 
Harker is the name of this friend of his); 
how, having made short work of the con- 
tents of their lunch baskets, they went 
several miles out of their way to a country 
hotel for supper (it turned out to be a 
supper fit for the gods, too)! And hadn't 
he told me he might be as late as mid- 
night? — aghast — of course he had! 

Danny Ricketty, the third Ricketty 
child, a pale stripling with a look in his 
eyes as if he were listening for the crack 
of doom, appeared during the course of 
breakfast, sans overcoat and mittens, blue- 
nosed, wide-mouthed, and so hungry he 
swallowed a warm biscuit in savage bites like 
a stray dog. He said Cissie " had a tantrum 
yesterday, and wouldn't go nowheres." 

I am oppressed by two questions: Is 
Cissie Ricketty temperamental? Did the 
Miracle Man really tell me he expected to 
return home late — or didn't he? 

50 



CHAPTER V 
Views Afield 

February 6. Snow and more snow in 
royal gale-driven veils of whiteness, until 
we have reached the dignity of a Sabbath 
blizzard. Three miles from church con- 
stitute as effectual a bar as thirty under the 
circumstances. But we are not without 
our own resources in this direction, and it is 
by no means unpleasant here where we sit 
with our backs to the fire. This is playing 
at life. This is studying the inscrutable 
blanched face of Nature at leisure. 

Across the road, at the gate of the little 
neglected cemetery where Screechy the owl 
is wont to hold forth, are three great, 
priestly cedars, now white-surpliced and 
whispering and bowing like the Three Wise 
Men. What is it they vsay, I wonder, sit- 
ting tense and listening at intervals, and 
then the material sense of comfort whelms 
all other senses for the moment, and I 
just placidly exist and am glad. 

Such a delectable odor as steals in from 

51 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

the kitchen meanwhile! A delicacy came 
our way yesterday. We are to have baked 
rabbit in cream gravy. Mr. Cottontail 
was seen to secrete himself in a culvert in 
front of The Cabin yesterday, from whence 
I drove him forth v/ith a prodding fishpole 
(according to instructions), to leap into the 
Miracle Man's waiting arms — such was the 
tale of the capture. For the slaughter I 
did not stay. Poor, pretty thing, so soft 
and silent and unresisting! 

" You've killed him! " I announced tragi- 
cally to the Miracle Man when the deed 
was done. 

He stared at me in unfeigned astonish- 
ment. 

" Did you want to eat him alive? " was 
his mild rejoinder. 

Little Ego, I am ashamed of the lusts of 
the flesh, but I am puzzled how to evade 
many of them. Still, blotting out the sense 
of the shortcomings of an earthly heritage, 
is an innermost, paradoxical joy in the hope 
that you may live to know human passion. 
How easily you take on the garb of flesh 
in such an hour as this, to my imagining. 
In one moment you strut and shout and 
puff out your cheeks boy fashion, and 

52 



VIEWS AFIELD 

scarcely is the vision fixed, when presto! 
you flirt your skirts and toss your hair over 
your shoulders and kiss your doll! Sur- 
reptitiously, I say to myself, " My son; my 
daughter," to determine, if possible, which 
has the better taste in my mouth — and 
fail hopelessly. I am like the donkey of 
ancient debate standing midway between 
two equally desirable haycocks and leaving 
it to the philosophers to decide to which 
one he will turn for his first bite. 

You see the Road to Motherhood has 
such long, long vistas as to make indeed a 
puzzle of it. But I have it all planned in 
a general way what shall happen when you 
can creep and when you can walk, and when 
you go to college, for that matter. Will you 
introduce your little old mother to the 
President, I wonder? 

February 11. At last, at last, a glorious 
sun full and warm! This air, as I open the 
door, is like an elixir, and the road, cleared 
for the milk-wagons, looks reasonably pas- 
sable. Why be at the daily routine like 
a squirrel in a revolving cage any longer? 
Why not erase the mental stamp of these 
four walls before it becomes indelible? 

53 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

Business of frantic searching for the 
Miracle Man's leggings, which I appropriate 
on occasion. Business of burying you, 
Book of My Heart, in the bottom of a 
bureau drawer, where like a dead man you 
will tell no inadvertent tales. Adieu, adieu 
for an hour and a half, and let me tell 
you in parting I wouldn't walk a city 
street if I could. 



Come to light again this day, little book 
of my confidences, while I introduce to you, 
as abruptly and unceremoniously as I 
myself met her in my morning's meander- 
ings, Next-to-Nowhere's Mis' Muffet — not 
the Miss Muffet to whom " there came a 
great spider, and sat down beside her." 
No spider, great or small, unless suicidally 
inclined, would sit down in. the vicinity of 
this Mis' Muffet; he would be apt to be 
struck decidedly with no delicate fist, and 
an irregularly defined, but very distinct, 
outline made of him. 

" Come in! " she commanded as I passed 
her door, next the smithy, on my morn- 
ing's walk. (She's the smith's wife, and as 
brawny as he.) 

54 



VIEWS AFIELD 

I came; it isn't easy to disobey her. 

" Sit down! " (The cerement of formal- 
ity has never held her a moment in its 
wrapping.) 

I sat — with the automatic obedience of 
a tin soldier when the string is pulled. 

" You're the new Mis' Barney, ain't 
you? " 

I meekly assented. More, I proceeded 
to ansv/er a long, brisk catechism with the 
careful exactness of a nice little girl of 
ten. 

I'll admit it — my catechist fascinated 
me. She's a large woman, this Mis' Muffet 
(as Next-to-Nowhere has her appellation), 
not to say colossal, in her purple-figured 
house-dress, unconfined save for the fasten- 
ing at the throat — a huge square brooch 
enclosed in a frame-like arrangement, and 
with spots like powdered cinnamon in the 
enclosure. On her ample breast and in the 
corners of her mouth (which has the ap- 
pearance of being stitched in heavily with 
gray thread) reposed the cake crumbs of a 
recent lunch, together with a generous 
sprinkling of the spice garnish. Her hair 
is dingy gray, her chin heavy, her eyes 
rheumy and unswerving in gaze. I shifted 

55 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

mine uneasily under their fixed intensity 
to the flaring lithograph on the wall behind 
the plush self-rocker where she sat — 
" Doggy, will you bite? " " Doggy," I 
meditated seriously, " perhaps you have 
occasion to bite — sometimes." 

My hostess could not have been aware of 
this unflattering thought digression, for 
presently, having finished her catechism 
and her inspection, she gave vent to a loud, 
frank laugh. 

" Why, you little figgerine, you pore 
little chippin* pewee," she remarked dis- 
passionately betw^een the gasps " you hain't 
big enough to be no man's wife! " 

My fascination grew. It bade fair to 
continue to grow. Again, I was the cap- 
tive Princess in the far-off land of Bom- 
baloo, and once more the witch had ap- 
peared. " Go along, you little hussy," I 
heard her say in some subconscious stratum 
of me, " boil me a beefsteak at once, and 
see that there are plenty of black beetles in 
the sauce! " 

To add to the effect. Mis' Muffet drew 
her chair up closer in the half darkness of 
the room (she has a grudge apparently 
against the sunshine). She wanted to tell 

56 



VIEWS AFIELD 

me, it appeared, apropos of nothing in 
particular, of her niece Corrina Anne, who 
had a continual, unsatisfied craving for 
cucumbers, before the birth of a child, and 
who bore a son with a cucumber on his 
lip — "yes, a perfect one, stem and all!" 
(Does this witch-like soul, by any chance, 
know of my condition?) And had I ever 
heard of the woman who shot a gopher while 
in a similar state and " marked " the cheek 
of her babe with the hairy outline of the 
little creature? . . . There was Sally Per- 
kins, too, over in the Hollow, who cut her 
thumb, and held it in a tight clutch to 
keep the blood back, and whose little 
daughter had never yet been able to open 
her hand. She — 

But the rather eerie recital was inter- 
rupted here by the appearance of Andy, 
the sole offspring of the Muffets' — a lad 
of twenty, who lounged into the room. 

Andy Muffet was designed as a model 
for a Kewpie doll instead of a blacksmith's 
son. He's a short, fattish, round-eyed 
youth with an expression of arrested baby- 
ishness and the tender mouth of a Greuze 
study grown up. 

" I wanted a girl the worst way, 'fore 

57 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE , 

he come," continued his mother in a bass 
buzzing behind her hand, not to be swayed 
by any consideration from her apparent 
hobby, " an' you see that red an' white 
skin o' his'n an' them dimples? Poor boy, 
he hates 'em like poison, an' I try to make 
it up to him ev'ry way I kin. You noticed 
that flute I got him, over there on the 
table, maybe? I give nine hens an' a 
carpet-sweeper in trade fer it." 

As I rose to go, taking advantage of the 
interruption, the husks seemed to fall in 
that speech from the character I had drawn 
mentally of the woman before me. I saw 
instead the mother-sacrifice of a strange 
creature, superstition-ridden, lonely some- 
times almost to madness, hungry with a 
mind-hunger she could not even gauge, crav- 
ing woman-sympathy, woman-understand- 
ing. 

" Will you come to see me? " I asked 
on impulse, taking her hand. " I make a 
point of having tea every afternoon, and 
I'd be glad to have you." 

Mis' Muffet drew back a step, her mouth 
working with some undecipherable emotion. 

" Good laws! " she said with a touch of 
raw cynicism, " you don't know what 

58 



VIEWS AFIELD 

you're a-askin', er you'd have no truck 
with me. Hep Sidney ast me to a coffee 
drinkin' over to her place t' the Prairie ' 
seven years ago, an' her pa was tuk with 
creepin' paralysis that same day an' never 
got up off'n his bed." 

February 12. " All the world's a neigh- 
borhood, and only the stars are foreign 
countries." 

Little Ego, I've been speculating on that 
since the Wanderlust took me in tow, and 
I must needs set the ball of my adventures 
rolling. And the further I go, the truer I 
find it. Twenty miles away from home 
today on a prosaic and very necessary trip 
to the dentist's. In the newness of my 
journeying, it might have been as many 
thousand! Abroad, same little human 
drama of yesteryear, yes, and the year 
before, and the year before that, I affirmed 
to myself, as I waved my farewell to the 
Miracle Man in the sleigh, and took a 
quick look around the already moving 
" interurban." 

There was the inevitable fat man with 
the cropped moustache and the absorbing 
newspaper; there, behind me, the equally 

59 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

inevitable thin one, with the faded necktie 
and the hair-agitating cough (problem 
for some philosopher: How many germs 
can sit on a hair, and are they always 
congenial enough to sit close?); there the 
dapper man with the fondness for violet 
water, and his friend, the inveterate talker, 
jaw working cheerfully. There, too, was 
the large woman under the tiny hat (deco- 
rated, by the way, with an erect flame- 
colored affair resembling nothing as much 
as a burning broom); the little one swathed 
in a widow's veil; the ultra-fashionable 
dowager in military blue, skirt of ab- 
breviated length; the over-tired, prematurely 
old woman with the huge, back-bending 
basket; the smiling, fresh-colored strap- 
hanging lass in her teens; the older society 
girl imitation of her, cheeks rouge-daubed. 

For me — my dear, how quickly the 
freedom of open spaces gets its grip on 
one! Entre nous, the restraint of street 
clothing bites into my soul. Neither am I 
in the habit of taking my air in homoeo- 
pathic doses. So I squirmed and yawned 
and tugged at my gloves and opened and 
closed my bag unnecessarily, until — well, 
I think I must have touched accidentally 

60 



VIEWS AFIELD 

that Aladdin's Lamp to which I seem to 
have lately fallen heir, and which I have 
only to rub to enrich my inner vision. 
Little Conjurer, my good Genii, when 
have you failed me yet? 

There, at the touch of the Lamp, as with 
the shifting of a film, I saw you all, fellow- 
journeymen, in a new guise — each as 
some woman's baby, some woman's and 
God's — with underneath the Everlasting 
Arms. 

You, Mr. Fat Man, wore a tiny bonnet 
of white and blue, and you, Mr. Talker, 
walked on wobbly, uncertain legs. You 
lisped, Mrs. Dowager Militaire, and put 
your cuddly little nose in your mother's 
neck, and as for you, Mrs. Burden Bearer, 
you blinked your wee eyes and beat with 
your soft fists in a way to make some 
woman forget that she staggered under the 
birth-curse for you and paid in flaccid 
breast and the sweat of agony. 

My heart warmed toward you, one and 
all; I wanted to know you better, to reach 
out the hand of fellowship to you, to serve 
you in some way if possible. Somebody's 
baby, each, and God's — with underneath 
the Everlasting Arms! 

61 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

It has been a long trip home tonight in 
the sleigh — a fragile night it is, so white 
and pretty it looks as if it might break. 
And all the while the mothers of the uni- 
verse came very near to me and touched my 
hands and communed with me. I never 
knew that hearts could hold so much, or 
stars shine so brightly. I couldn't say a 
word, but there was no need for me to 
talk. The Miracle Man, goaded to it no 
doubt by his day of loneliness, found his 
tongue, for a change, and used it, save when 
cheek on cheek took the place of speech. 

It would have been an ideal time to 
have told him a secret that is fast getting 
too big for me to carry alone. But for 
some reason, trivial as a sigh, elusive as 
thistledown, I hold it still. 

February 14. St. Valentine, benign and 
hoary, smiles at us from over the hills. 
In honor of the day I have unearthed a 
treasure-box of dear, foolish little things 
a king's ransom could not buy. Here's a 
little lawn apron piped with pink, that 
belonged to the Miracle Man, aged three, 
and there's his little knitted shoe, yellowed 
with age. (His mother, bless her sainted 

62 



VIEWS AFIELD 

memory, kept them for me.) And this is 
his photograph, aged five. Was ever a 
boy more sturdy and promising in his ten- 
der years? Here's his first composition, 
a marvelous scrawl on the subject of Crab- 
fishing; and a little, old, faded two-penny 
valentine with huge roses and a heart with 
" For my mother " written across it in the 
same sprawling hand. 

Oh, Miracle Man, my Miracle Man, of 
whom such a short time ago I knew noth- 
ing, now bone of my bone and flesh of my 
flesh, what a queer thing is life! Some- 
body's father and mother-to-be! How good 
God is to us! 



It's an old woman who lives in reminis- 
cences you say. Little Book? Listen, then, 
while I relate the rest of my St. Valentine's 
story. 

When the mail-man drove up this morn- 
ing, he hallooed, and having so inveigled 
me forth, put a parcel into my hand, a 
parcel marked " perishable " and having a 
city postmark. Opened, it revealed under 
layers of packing, nothing more or less 
than a florist's box of violets — real, hones t- 

63 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

to-goodness, living, breathing violets on 
this snow Sahara! (No, I'm not dreaming, 
though I've had to pinch myself till I'm 
black and blue to make sure of it.) 

The Miracle Man and I, having flipped 
off a card which lay on the top, marked 
only M. L., walked around them in a 
trance for a half hour, and this not sufficing 
in my case to relieve my pent-up feelings, 
I waited until he went out, and then got 
down on my knees and kissed them (an 
entirely impersonal kiss with no thought 
of a donor). I couldn't help it; though I 
had the grace to blush at my weakness 
when he came back and caught me at it. 
Ever since, he has seemed awkwardly quiet 
and a little distrait. I wonder — I wonder 
— yes, and I half know, too. You see, 
there was Martin Lester. Martin Lester is 
a part of my story (a very small part), 
a neat little professor who once tried to 
hold my hand. The Miracle Man would 
never have known anything about him, 
only that Aunt Idella, in an attempt to 
discourage his Irish pertinacity, once said 
before him that she should think if I had to 
marry I'd consider Martin's suit. 

Mr. Lester, as it happens, is at the 

64 



VIEWS AFIELD 

present moment, a missionary in China, 
but of that the Miracle Man knows noth- 
ing. I smile to myself with the knowledge, 
and hold my peace. Why do I like to 
hurt a perfectly good man? 



Sitting tonight with the violets between 
us (in more senses than one), filling the 
room with their sweetness, I unrolled 
casually before his eyes a bit of paper 
which I had found some time since in 
their depths. " Romans 1 : 1-12 " is the 
inscription: "That I may be comforted 
together with you, by the mutual faith, 
both of you and me. Mary Laird." 
(" Asking Mary.") And above is the 
name of the hospital, " Trinity," where she 
has been persuaded at last to go for treatment. 

February 17. What a mushroom growth a 
meditated-on secret attains in the course of 
a few days. Ever since the violet episode, 
I've felt that I ought to tell the Miracle 
Man of this thing that is overflowing the 
walls of my soul — this thing that makes 
me more truly and indisputably his even 
than my vows, if possible, but how, how? 

65 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

I lately read a little story of a woman 
with a like puzzle on her mind, who solved 
it in a burst of inspiration by formally 
putting on her coat and hat, and going as 
a patient to her doctor-husband. 

But obviously that way is barred for 
me. Nor dare I evolve too complex a 
scheme. There's an alienist some twenty 
miles from here, and the leading man in the 
drama might find some way of communicat- 
ing with him. 

It's a delicate situation in all truth. 
I'm no clairvoyant, by any means, but, 
judging by the excellent opportunities that 
I have already permitted to slip from my 
grasp, I foresee that my confession is 
planning to try its wings in the most 
awkward and inopportune and unromantic 
moment possible. 

February 21. Wash Day. I'm a better 
prophetess than you might think, little 
Ego. At least I guessed rightly about the 
" awkward and inopportune and unromantic 
moment " aforementioned. 

Let me tell you, as a sort of premonitory 
burst, there's very little romance in wash 
day anyhow, particularly if taken in con- 

66 



VIEWS AFIELD 

junction with a low bread supply, an 
amazing array of unwashed dishes, a 
remnant of mending from a previous week, 
the prospect of a dinner of Kaiserine sim- 
plicity, and a vision of the endless wash 
days through which one will probably live, 
together with their long multiplication of 
Spartan meals. 

I had my hands in the biscuit dough, 
and I was obliged to turn my head to one 
side, to my intense disgust with myself, 
to keep drops of salt water from falling 
into it (I so despise a crying woman, my 
approval is with the man who boasted that 
he had seen his wife's tears only four 
times — three for death, and once when the 
ink froze) — when in trotted my Miracle 
Man from the shop, unexpectedly. 

Did I behave myself in a seemly manner, 
befitting a woman my age? Make your 
own deductions. I rushed at him, doughy 
hands uplifted, as if I were doing the Sea- 
gull Swoop in the Fox Trot (old Dan 
Tucker is the sole terpsichorean indulgence in 
Next-to-Nowhere, but I've seen the pictures). 

He stopped short, arms folded high and 
chin up like Caruso as Rhadames in Aida 
(another picture). 

67 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

But the minute it was out, he moved — 
backward, against the cellar-door, where he 
leaned basso-rilievo, pale as a prophet. 

I could have bitten my tongue out for 
the sheer clumsiness of the performance, 
only that it would have availed me nothing, 
then. Besides, what with his gathering me 
up the next moment, and washing my hands 
and face at the sink as gently and master- 
fully as if I'd been two years old, I didn't 
have time. 

" For me, for me," he kept saying as if 
I'd martyred myself for him. (If God ever 
made a more tender man, I wonder where 
He put him.) I wanted to tell him some- 
thing of this sort, but my throat hurt, 
and I only managed to murmur a platitude 
about my willingness to walk on hot plow- 
shares for him. And all the while I hadn't 
been able to keep my precious bit of in- 
formation from popping out at him as if 
it had been shot out of a gun! 



68 



CHAPTER VI 

Heights and Depths 

February 27 . A secret that has once taken 
flight from the heart, even to wing no 
further than that heart's nearest, is a 
secret no longer. But this sharing of ours 
is too exquisite to regret. Today, with al- 
most a week of it gone by, the bloom is 
still intact, and we have walked all over 
the place together as if it were perfectly 
new to us, unraveling the knowable things 
of the saga of parenthood. The Miracle 
Man says whimsically that we have found 
the leprechawn, an Irish fairy which when 
captured gives you all the gold you want. 
(How different is his kiss, his touch, since 
he knows! Oh, God, it was a wonderful 
moment in which Thou didst make women 
to be mothers!) What a warm, singing, 
inexplicable thing is this hope in the 
breast! We plan as we have never planned 
before. We will enlarge the strawberry 
patch another year, and add to the garden. 
Alfalfa is a comparatively new crop here, 

69 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

but worth trying, we decide, in the light of 
the experience of a Scotch farmer of the 
vicinity who last year realized $80 an acre 
from it. We shall find the leprechawn 
indeed, and must hold fast, says the 
Miracle Man, who is, " as the greatest only 
are, in his simplicity divine." In view 
already of the glint of fairy trappings, we 
babbled to each other without listening, and 
went, as is our habit, like two children, to 
feed the chickens, laughing absurdly at the 
Malvolian strut of a certain Mrs. Biddie 
whom we suspect of " Suffragette " tenden- 
cies. A covey of quail sometimes come to 
share in the meal, the long, hard winter 
having made their food very scarce. But a 
hint of spring is on the way. There was a 
flock of wild ducks in an open space on the 
mill-pond this afternoon. We hailed them 
with rapture, and frightened them into 
flight. Some white-winged gulls scurried 
over the ice to take their place. The mill- 
wheel churned peacefully. Under the pink 
valance of joy, what transformations appear 
on every side. In the opalescent light, 
The Cabin, even, took on the whiteness of 
Carrara marble. 

Tonight there is a " cold " moon away to 

70 



HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS 

the north, prodigal of its light, and thin 
as an old crone's wedding-ring. But with 
the softly burning candles of the sanctity of 
home alight on our hearth, what need have 
we for other illumination? What need, I 
may ask, for anything over and above our 
holdings? Hold fast to the leprechawn, for- 
sooth! We are rich now, redundantly rich! 

Palpitant little Mystery, with whom the 
whole place is thought-tapestried, till life 
is full to the point of tears, if ever I have 
been in doubt of it, this hour I am sure, 
without you we should have gone all our 
lives beggared! 

March 4. " The whirligig of time brings 
his revenges." 

I am sitting propped up with pillows 
like a Pasha of the Porte, my right ankle 
strapped with adhesive plaster, and the 
pervasive odor of liniment filling the room. 

Little Ego, I'm afraid, with some of 
the ultra- modernists, I've been trying to 
change my marriage vows from " love, 
honor and obey " to " love, honor and be 
gay," and as a reward, I am feeling as 
sheepish as Willy Beals used to look in the 
dunce's seat. 

71 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

And thereon hangs the tale of how, in 
the soft, melty afternoon of day before 
yesterday, I went out with a small shining 
tin pail to hunt trouble in its lair. 

Now, the tin pail was designed for spring 
water — not trouble — for we've a spring in 
the clump of willows beyond the marsh, a 
bubbling, busy spring with peppery sands, 
a fringe of cress-greenness and a sparkle all 
of its own. 

" I feel the lure of the teetery bogs," 
said I tentatively to the Miracle Man, who 
had Chu-chu hitched to the cart, and 
was about to start on an expedition for 
groceries. 

He jumped down and intercepted me 
with the authoritative way of the male 
Irishman. 

" But it's not fit for you to go," he 
said, superiorly, reaching out an imperative 
hand for the pail; " I forbid you." 

"You — forbid me?" my voice sounded 
weak and a long way ofif. 

The wind whipped my drabbled skirts 
around my ankles, and turned his nose to a 
hue contrasting unpleasantly with his hair. 
How could I ever have imagined that I 
admired dominance in a man? 

72 



HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS 

My own Irish, of v/hich I flatter myself 
I ordinarily keep the upper hand, was 
clamoring for its chance. 

It failed to get it — in words. But I 
walked awa}^, head well up, with a sadden- 
ing reflection on the capriciousness of this 
marital joy that lifts one to perilously 
delightful heights, and then collapses as 
suddenly as the air goes out of a toy bal- 
loon — a reflection I took care should not 
show itself in the glad abandon of my gait 
as I struck out gaily across the scatter- 
ing snow-patches into the bunchy swale 
beyond. 

I hoped he was looking; I earnestly 
hoped so. As a matter of fact, he was not, 
or he would have seen me, shortly, dem- 
onstrating the wisdom of Solomon in his 
setting forth that " pride goeth before 
destruction and an haughty spirit before a 
fall." (The sort of elucidation I attempted 
was that the fall may be very literal and 
immediate.) In justice to myself, I made a 
laudable endeavor to rise with unconcern, 
but a wrenching stab in the region of my 
foot caused me to think better of it. 

Utter inertia while the pain talked 
glibly. I babbled back some kind of an 

73 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

answer, choking on a sob, and finishing it 
with a series of whines that might have 
coaxed a coyote forth from the wild. 

A pair of loud-voiced crows, jetty little 
goblins of the marsh, sharply outlined by 
the sapphire ice of the creek, jeered un- 
kindly. A V-shaped battalion of wild geese 
at the zenith, honking toward Lake Winne- 
bago, shrieked out their derision. 

I moved a trifle, beginning to discover 
that I was more effectual than waning old 
Sol in " melting a spot." I could creep a 
bit, but it hurt — oh, it hurt — and how 
chilling after all was the seemingly mild 
spring air. The discarded tin pail blinked 
faintly with a puzzled glint. I was puzzled 
myself — not how I'd spend the remainder 
of the day, however, nor — bleak possibility 
— the night soon to come, the night, long 
and grim and cruel and sleety with black 
clouds wig-wagging weird messages to me 
I couldn't make out, and — and — 

I covered my face, and lived through it, 
then and there, and uncovered it — to a 
glimpse of dingy anilin-pink calico that 
looked better to me at that moment than 
a coronation robe! 

" Why, you poor, mis'able little gump," 

74 



HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS 

came in dulcet tones across the bogs, 
" what d'ye think yer a-doin', anyhow? " 

And a few minutes later, for the second 
time in the course of a few weeks, I was 
seized by the arms and lifted into space by 
the gallant Cissie. 

" It's your luck I was comin' cross-lots," 
was her terse observation as she performed 
the feat. 

" 'Tis the day of the woman — after 
that, the reckoning," said the Miracle 
Man, equally terse, on his return, following 
the reeking scent of my emergency bottle 
into the bedroom with the stalk of a caged 
lion. 

But that quick Celtic pallor of his belied 
the brusqueness of his speech. And for the 
scientific skill and deftness of those big 
hands he owns, quieting as a soporific, I 
could forgive him anything. 

March 11. Still propped up in state, al- 
though I have been so fortunate as to sus- 
tain nothing more serious than an ordinary 
sprain. 

There are more ways than one of playing 
at life. I am reminded of the great army 
of hurt and maimed and handicapped ones 

75 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

amongst us, daily condemned to watch the 
great pageant, sorrowfully, from the out- 
skirts of the procession, as it were. Why? 
Why? 

Mother Nature pauses a minute to shake 
her head inscrutably, and turns her atten- 
tion again to her chief concern, the fertility 
of the output. Meantime they sit, the un- 
fortunates, a long, white-faced, unanswered 
line in the light of day, each trying pitifully 
to construct from the fragments of things 
left to him his own " modus vivendi." 
And ^ the delicate pendulum of Destiny 
swings on, and the great world wags her 
way, little guessing. What matters it when 
Heaven guesses and lays a cool hand on the 
fevered forehead of Mischance? Some day, 
in God's good time, she will lay bare to the 
sufferer a reason. " For now we see as 
through a glass darkly, but then face to 
face." 

A robin flew down from the porch-roof 
just now, and perched on the topmost step 
below — another mile-stone on our journey 
to spring. Out of his extended vocabulary, 
he picked a single word of interrogation, 
repeating it again and again. How stupid 
of me, for all my vaunted human intelli- 

76 



HEIvGHTS AND DEPTHS 

gence, not to be able to understand, after 
all the unfailing years I have known the 
comfort of the sound! I apologize, little 
companionable fellow, and imitate your 
word as nearly as I can in my clumsy foreign 
tongue to cover my embarrassment. You 
recall to me a warm spring morning in 
March — how long ago is it? — when I 
set out to teach my first term of school, and 
little Lottie Meade, the youngest pupil, 
still dimpled with the divinity of babyhood, 
toddled across the lawn after you, or was 
it your great-grandfather several times 
removed ? 

No matter. Little Lottie wears a Miss 
before her name today, and has no inkling 
of how her old teacher once took her in 
her lap and crooned over her and smoothed 
her yellow curls, and asked God speechlessly 
for a little girl of her own some day, not 
daring to put the naked desire into lan- 
guage. The hour of my young passion is 
by, and yet He who holdeth in His hand 
this oldest verity of the race has remem- 
bered, nor taken into account my proven 
unfitness in the little House of my Achieve- 
ment which I have builded upon the sands. 
Sing for me my Te Deum Laudamus, little 

77 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

questioner of the red and quivering throat. 
It is a world of redeemed promises, is it 
not, this spring world silently stretching 
out to where the willows are growing red- 
der with the receding of the white sea — 
a world of redeemed promises and music. 
My very dreams are like a melody, with 
Spotty Sue, who is quite herself again, 
purring the obligato. 

And see, there comes the Miracle Man 
into the well-trod path his feet have made. 
What is it he carries with such awkward 
carefulness? Cress from the spring, as I 
live — yes, and the little shining, dented 
tin pail filled to the brim — his way of 
eating humble pie! Dear heart, dear heart, 
irrefragably mine, having once tasted of 
your devotion is like the first quaff of some 
Pierian spring; one thirsts forever afterward. 



March 16 



Said the Shah of Teheran, 
'Now, tell me, if you can. 
Why a man his life encumbers 
With wives in plural numbers, 
When it takes but one small wife 
To make a man's whole life 
A source of endless strife? ' 
Then he swore — the worthy man." 

78 



HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS 

The housecleaning fever seized me in no 
merciful grip the moment I again set foot 
to the floor — not that I know anything 
about that periodic housewifely disturbance 
by teaching or habit — simply a call — 
is it of civilization or the wild? 

Would Mrs. Man Friday, I wonder 
(had there been such a dame), been given, 
for example, to the beating of her goat-skin 
rugs at regular intervals? Happy Man 
Friday who had no chance to find out, for 

" This little diff'rence 'twixt a man and woman 
Has been the cause of lots of strife, I've seen; 
Man thinks a house was made for folks to live in, 
A woman that 'twas simply made to clean." 

The Miracle Man departed this morning 
for the woodlot, where he is hewing down a 
tree, and Cissie and I improved the time by 
taking all of the dishes out of the cupboard, 
and heaping them in unpicturesque con- 
fusion on table and sink. He returned 
abruptly a half hour later, and casting an 
eye over the despoliation about the kitchen, 
gave me the saddest, most speaking look I 
have ever had from him. 

" You too," it said, with an actual wince, 
" bitten v/ith that common mania? " 

79 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

I perceive that I have discovered the loca- 
tion of his psychological corns. But the 
work must go on willy-nilly. Things look 
shabby, and I foresee a long pull. 

"Oh, poverty's a weary thing, 
'Tis full of grief and pain," 

quotes his disgruntled lordship, with a 
humorous wagging of his head, as I drag 
to light among other things a worn 
comforter. 

Fie, fie, Mr. Miracle Man, as if there 
were any poverty whatever in all the land 
save that of heart and brain! And this 
unseemly upheaval, I would have you under- 
stand, is educative — yes, I said educative. 
One must cultivate an eye even for cob- 
webs. 

" Never mind," he says, soothingly, though 
whether to himself or me is an open matter 
of debate, " you'll get over it after a while." 

March 18. A little peddler woman came 
to the door this morning — one of those 
derelicts with which the country is flooded 
with the first warm rays of the spring sun. 

Poor little soul, what a sorry story she 
spelled from her low, unseasonable, almost 

80 



HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS 

soleless shoes to her sparse, dingy gray 
knob! 

I did not want the shoestrings she had 
to offer, nor yet the red bandannas nor 
yellow suspenders, and so, on principle, I 
did not buy, though I had to slam the 
door of my heart hard to close it against 
the practiced appeal of her soft foreign 
voice and beseeching hands folded like a 
devotee's at a shrine, to carry meaning, I 
suppose, over a linguistic gulf. 

Is it wise or not, Little Ego, always to act 
on principle? You will have to decide alone. 

For myself, I cannot now get the sight 
of that little peddler woman's dry blue 
lips out of my mind. I am wishing I had 
offered her something consoling, a cup of 
tea, perhaps, or the red geranium I have 
coaxed into blossom. A v/isp of time to 
grudge out of the day's hurry. Would she 
have understood? What a problem life is 
on every hand! As stewards accountable 
for every moment, how wretchedly we fail, 
dear, and again how wretchedly. What if 
God retaliated in failure? But no — look 
at His spring world from the window with 
me, its sodden places now white-encrusted 
and marked with the unending trails of 

81 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

rabbits over the fields. How steadily it 
marches on, let the little blessed golden 
touslehead dandelion I found today in a 
fence corner tell. Some of the posts are 
down in the enclosure surrounding the 
tiny cemetery across the way. They put 
me in mind of prostrate bodies — not 
human — unwieldly, useless things like dead 
opportunities. Was there ever a sadder 
ghost that walked than the ghost of 
Wasted Chance? 

March 23, 2 A.M. Ho, learned man of 
science who lately proudly fathered adrenin, 
the substitute of sleep, here is a lone woman 
on the edge of the wilderness blinking in 
the light of a guttering candle with a rival 
discovery — a Fear-ghost communing which 
banishes old-fashioned sleep to the shad- 
ows of the forgotten! 

What a pity surely in the slothfulness of 
slumber to miss this marvelous blue- 
black night world, pulsing with stars, set 
with a silver plaque of moon and wrapped 
in a silence so eloquent, so forgetful of the 
fever of life, one is reminded of the Hindoo 
Kaber's " Hark to the unstruck bells and 
drums! " 

82 



HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS 

I am possessed of the fancy that I could 
touch the stars by reaching out. 

The big trees stand waiting breathlessly 
for something to happen. 

A million million fermenting deeds have 
melted into the spiritual coolness of the 
night. 

" Bos'n Bill's an atheist still," we are 
told, " except sometimes in the dark." 
Was there ever an atheist in the dark? 

My pulses are like trip-hammers as I 
think of all those other mothers-to-be out 
there across the enchanted space's velvety 
pall, from painted women to saints, each 
with her own peculiar pain-problem. A 
spikenard for the ease of suffering is this 
subtle kinship. Our souls speak a universal 
language, the Esperanto of mothers. 

I will not be afraid; and again I send 
the thought message out across the depth- 
less ether to those other waiting ones, I 
will not be afraid! 



83 



CHAPTER VII 
Spring Smiles and Frowns 

March 30. We have been the instigators 
and only eye-witnesses of a tragedy in 
which we were not the participants. 

Another auction in the neighborhood 
furnished an excuse for the Miracle Man 
to bring home to his poultry pen a great, 
proud, superfluous, thoroughbred Rhode 
Island rooster of which he had become 
enamoured — Mike Reddy by name — with 
a swagger like the leading man in a musical 
comedy. 

Little Ego, I have a game these lengthening 
days, a secret sort of game at which only 
two can play, in which I take you up in my 
arms and carry you out to see the bid- 
dies and hear their raucous, joyous egg- 
songs. 

My special admiration has been bestowed 
thus far on the Shah of the flock, a digni- 
fied Plymouth Rock bird, dubbed Chauncy 
Woodhead for his quiet, scholarly, and re- 
tiring manner (for his species), not to men- 

84 



SPRING SMILES AND FROWNS 

tion the rings like spectacles about his 
eyes. 

Fancy then my consternation last night 
when Mike Reddy stepped in, took an 
officious look around, attacked poor 
Chauncy on no visible provocation and all 
but finished him. 

Did his harem of biddies stand by him, 
you ask? 

With Clytemnestra-like faithlessness they 
deserted him to a fowl (a disgrace to the 
sex I call it), preened themselves, and 
sang around the newcomer shamelessly to 
the huge amusement of the Miracle Man — 
a short-lived amusement albeit, for this 
morning by some unsolved Nemesis which 
overtook Mike Reddy we found him dead 
under the roosts, one of the faithless, an 
" enolamous sufiflagette of a hen," standing 
by with hysterical cackling. Chauncy, for 
his part, seemed none the worse for the 
fray, and bore himself with his customary 
modesty — a true model for the victor. 

Babe-to-be, it is a place of endless 
interest, a place of endless study, even to 
its uttermost parts and to its tiniest detail, 
this place that is holding out its arms to 
you, and I would that you might know early 

85 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

in your stay so that it may redound to 
your eternal profit, " commonplaces are the 
raw material of greatness; in common- 
places we find our thrones." 

April 1. See, see, Madame April has 
come up golden-footed into the valley. 
The air is soft-freighted with the smoky, 
earthy breath of smouldering, marsh- 
turned loam. 

The pink shafts of early day still lie on 
the eastern horizon. The cowslips are 
yellow buttons on the fresh green middy of 
spring, for lo, " the winter is past, the time 
of the singing of birds is come, and the 
voice of the turtle is heard in the land." 

Little Ego, they are making this meek, 
erstwhile frost-bit earth over new for you, 
sweeping it, and garnishing it afresh with 
greening grass in the spring run, and fat 
gray catkins on the alders, subtly trans- 
muting the meanness of dingy brown to the 
glory tints of budding summer. 

I am carried away with Thoreau's 
problem: What is the first thing that stirs 
in the spring? But though I have made 
honest investigation, searching broadly in 
my wanderings as 

86 



SPRING SMILES AND FROWNS 

" Wind along the waste, I know not whither, willy 
nilly blowing " 

I have found no answer. 

April 2. The faraway ting of a Sabbath 
bell on the clear air. Sparrows venturing 
on coloratura trills. Marsh fires glowing 
smoky red against the distant horizon. 
Crows cawing madly to each other; the 
lingering reverberations of a thundering 
train. The bluish, wraith-like columns of 
smoke from our handful of chimney-pots 
rising like incense to the pearly luminance 
of heaven. 

Such was the picture of our day at its 
beginning. 

Cissie Ricketty joined our little procession 
made in answer to the bell's invitation, over 
the hill to church. 

I wish you might see our Cissie today. I 
have made her a little straw bonnet out of 
one of my own of yesteryear, trimmed with 
a wreath of long preserved silk June roses 
which bid fair to last forever. She is 
inordinately proud of it, and grateful with 
a pitiful, doggish gratitude. In keeping 
with the consequent new role she has 
deemed it necessary to assume, she has 

87 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

surprised her olive skin with a soapy bath 
that has put unwonted high lights upon 
it, and unearthed a bit of ribbon from 
somewhere. 

She sat in seeming disgust during the 
rather operatic rendition of the offertory 
solo sung by a young lady from afar, but 
the real state of her mind was revealed 
later when she remarked to me on our 
homeward way, " warn't it queer how a 
woman could be made to holler so, 'thout 
bein' neither scairt ner hurt? " 

No malice, I feel sure, was intended, 
though she m.ay have felt some jealousy. 
Andy Muffet sings in the choir, for the 
better display, I half believe, of his white 
vest and tan shoes, and he this morning 
occupied the chair next the visiting so- 
prano and made the most of it. 

Is Cissie interested in Andy Muffet? 
As she herself informs me naively, she is 
not one to '* hang her heart on a tree for 
the birds to peck at," but- — but — the 
more shame to me for the restricting clause 
I am tempted to put down. It is only a 
Mattie Meddler who concerns herself with 
the workings of another woman's heart 
unbidden. Worse, I am deserving, I sus- 

88 



SPRING SMILES AND FROWNS 

pect, of Aunt Idella's accusation of some 
time past that I could " find a romance 
in a pan of ashes! " 

April 10. Did you ever know an Irish- 
man's menage that was complete without a 

pig? 

Up to date, by some freak of fortune, 
we have been without that useful and 
unornamental addition to our holdings. 

Behold us, then, in an effort to redeem 
ourselves. 

The Miracle Man had Chu-chu in the 
cart directly after breakfast, with a hasty 
explanation concerning a certain O. I. C. 
to be had at a farm of country-side re- 
nown in the Hollow — " O. I. C," he 
repeated impatiently in a futile attempt to 
elucidate. 

" But, oh, I do not see, unfortunately," 
I complained with would-be facetiousness, 
planting myself firmly in the path of the 
meditative Chu-chu — "that is, I do not 
see why I am left to play the lonely part 
of watch-dog on the premises so often of 
late." 

That recalcitrant dimple of his (I for- 
got to tell you, didn't I, of a winning 

89 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

indentation in his beardless right cheek?) 
whipped itself into play at this, but he 
showed no further signs of having received 
a broad hint. 

"There's a thunderstorm from over the 
lake about due," he parried, pointing with 
his whip to the eastward, where some dingy 
clouds spread themselves like the wings 
of an infinitely magnified dun hawk-moth; 
" suppose it were to overtake us; you know 
you'd never have the courage to remain out 
in it." 

This last so determined me, I had clapped 
on my hat, and was jabbing in the pins, 
before he had it well out of his mouth. 

He gave in reluctantly at that and we 
set out laughing — was there a spice of 
wickedness in his laugh! I have thought 
so since, but I was so absorbed in my 
triumph at the moment I could not be 
sure. 

At any rate, we had gone scarcely two 
miles when the warm, murky air (what un- 
seasonable warmth we have had now and then 
this year for early spring!), broke into long 
vivid streaks of quivering zigzagging light- 
ning; cows lowed in presage of the oncoming 
disturbance; lambs bleat; sheep bounded 

90 



SPRING SMILES AND FROWNS 

awkwardly up the hillside (their grayish 
festoons of wool decorate the wire fences 
for miles hereabouts) ; a ghostly whippoor- 
will set up its plaint; thunder crashed, 
and the rain began to fall in torrents. 

Now, truth to tell, a thunderstorm terri- 
fies me more than would a hungry, playful 
tiger, or the Kaiser's army in full pursuit, 
but I sat up stiffly and held my jaw to keep 
it from shaking while the lightning tickled 
the tips of our noses and the thunder was 
in a fair way to split our ear-drums; for 
five minutes, that is. Then I cast my eyes 
despairingly about the miserable tumble- 
down shed in which we were lucky enough 
to secure some refuge, and began to rave. 
I am not a woman for nothing. 

" You have no regard for me," I shrieked 
hysterically, doing my best to out-tempest 
the tempest, " or you would have made me 
stay at home! " 

The Miracle Man bit his lips. He 
couldn't answer an argument like that, it 
was plain to be seen. He seemed as 
comfortable, as provokingly comfortable, 
furthermore, as if he were leaning back in 
an easy-chair, looking at the picture of a 
storm. 

91 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

''You don't know what fear means," I 
quavered finally, with regret, for I hate, oh, 
I hate to pander to the male vanity; but 
there are times — times when it becomes ex- 
pedient, you know. And, having won him. 
so, as I calculated to do, he held me close, 
and the strong, steady, even stir of his heart 
comforted me ; and the tempest abated ; and 

— yes, we are to own that wonderful O. I. C. 

— though it looks to me just like a common 

pig- 
Tonight we glory in a delicately far- 
reaching smell of wet, greening grass, which 
in its drenched sweetness is like nothing else; 

"... the fitful storm has fied, 

The clouds lie piled up in the splendid west, 
In massive shadow, topped with purplish red 

Crimson or gold; the scene is one of rest." 

"I'm afraid you think I specialize in 
tragedy," I have murmured meekly to the 
man beside me on the porch. 

" Tragedy, tragedy," he scratched his 
head ruminatively; " literally, it seems to 
me, if I remember rightly, a goat-song, 
probably from tragedies being originally 
exhibited when a goat was the prize. Well, 
sure enough, you had mine, this time! " 

92 



SPRING SMILES AND FROWNS 

And I have been pondering over that 
jumbled observation ever since. 

April 12. Little Ego, how will you like 
having cave-people in your immediate 
ancestry, I wonder. 

Today I have been initiated into a fresh 
mystery of the wild — I was invited, yes 
coaxed, to accompany the Miracle Man on 
his round for spring muskrats, and having 
a weighty sense of the honor thus con- 
ferred, I could not do less than go. 

It was quite worth while, and here is a 
gleaning from the trip for you. 

In one of the traps, set in a place where 
the pond encroaches on a gray little break 
in the woods, we discovered a white 
weasel — a tiny creature with a long, soft, 
cold, sinuous body, an underhung jaw, and 
a peculiar, penetrating scent. The skin 
will bring more than that of the muskrat, 
I am told, and the money we earn in this 
way is to go toward a layette fund. 

Delightful prospect, but — poor little 
white weasel! 

How It happens that my family Is more 
important than his, I should hate to be 
called upon to explain. 

93 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

We salve our consciences with the worn 
excuse: somebody would have made the 
capture if we had not. How sure of our- 
selves we mortals are! 

April 22. A fortnight in which old King 
Winter picked us up by the scruff of the 
neck, laughed at Madame April, and 
bandied us about to suit his whim. But the 
sun is the more a godsend as it reappears, 
stirring to life new chirpings in the grass, 
and swelling the fat buds of unripe green 
on the lilac trees. How life waits on its 
ministry! 

Our spotted calf, a recent arrival, its 
unruly head already in an encumbering 
poke, stretches out his long legs idly in it. 
Spotty Sue, who had been missing for some 
days, descended wanly from the haymow 
to bask on the woodpile. I followed cer- 
tain pitiful mewings which she left in her 
wake, and discovered three tiny gray kit- 
tens, whereupon she returned and set about 
her maternal duties anew. Dear Spotty 
Sue, with pleading eyes and motherly 
solicitude, she seems a being deified. 

With what congenial indoor evenings, 
memorable in the flight of time, have we 

94 



SPRING SMILES AND FROWNS 

improved the interim of the sun's absence! 
The Miracle Man says he knows we are 
mates because we both like to sit in our 
stockinged feet, we invariably say " Hop 
along, Cassiday " to any frog which ven- 
tures into our path, and neither of us can 
carry a tune. 

I smiled over my sewing at that. I 
am stitching a little night-dress with a 
draw-string in the hem to keep a wee pair 
of feet cozily warm. 

" Sister Susie's sewing shirts for soldiers," 
he mocks when he discovers me in the act. 

" For soldiers! " I protest. " See, see, 
it looks charming on her — " holding it out 
at arm's length. 

And then perhaps because the Miracle 
Man feigns to doubt my sanity, and insists 
upon a change of occupation, I put the 
little gown aside, and read to him from a 
new magazine a story in which the hero 
stands with a gardenia in his buttonhole 
and a delicate cup in his hand, sipping 
chocolate and telling some other man's 
wife of his love for her. I try to imagine 
my Miracle Man in like situation, and find 
the thing so incongruous, I laugh till 
Cissie Ricketty and her younger sister 

95 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

Norine, who are making candy in the 
kitchen, thrust curious heads in at the door 
— a laugh in which my sole auditor joins 
so derisively, I toss the tale aside for an 
old, old novel. 

" Hail, sweet asylum of my infancy! " 
I begin in the reaction. 

'' Asylum is good," growls the Miracle 
Man under his breath, with shocking 
slanginess. 

So we are obliged to fall back upon the 
mail-order catalogue and the output of 
various seed-houses, which are often ro- 
mantic but never maudlin, and which in 
the rural districts are always distinctly in 
order. To betray us further, we have been 
knov/n to desert Hume's Philosophy and 
Ibsen for them. 

Little Ego, all this by way of warning — 
or rather, preparation. 

Will you, with true modern tendency, 
attempt some day to reform this hopelessly 
commonplace old father and mother of 
yours? 

There is a wide field, I must admit, 
ready to your hand. 



96 



CHAPTER VIII 
With the March of Things 

May 1. We have had the sensation of the 
year. 

Who should come to us in a dazzHngly 
accoutred automobile this morning, but 
June Craddock going a-Maying, and driving 
her own car like an expert. 

June is a wonderful woman — a clear 
exponent of the modern capable type, and 
withal (I believe I neglected to enlarge 
upon this) as lovely as her name. It is 
hard to imagine that such gold tints exist 
(outside of a story-book) as her excellently 
well-cared-for hair shows, her skin has the 
delicacy of texture of a Mariposa lily; 
and her little even teeth in their flexible 
red sheath of lip, when she laughs, are a 
continual fascination. 

The Miracle Man, who came out of his 
shop at the honk of her horn, actually 
had on his carpenter's apron, and was 
running his hands good-naturedly through 

97 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

that thick, red, hirsute jungle of his. But 
— be prepared for a surprise, Httle Book 
of My Heart, I watched with both eyes 
and well-concealed belligerence for that 
critical, characteristic oblique glance afore- 
said, and saw never a vestige of it. 

It's the unexpected that always happens, 
isn't it? As the children say in the old, 
old game: " Here we go, 'round and 'round, 
by the rules of contrary." 

How June's merry chatter takes the dull 
edge from things! Already she has been 
all over the place, not neglecting the shop, 
for she says she loves the smell of pine 
shavings. She's as tactful as she's merry, 
too. I was glad to be left to my own 
devices with the dinner — for, perversely, 
I dislike an offer of help from a guest — a 
fact she must have discovered by intuition. 

Remembering the slaw-cutter episode, 
however, and being of a firm mind to avoid 
catastrophe in this instance, I was so slow 
and painstaking as to barely leave time at 
the noon hour to " slick " my hair and 
slip into my new white wash-silk ma- 
ternity dress. 

The two came in together, chatting 
like old friends, and swinging their hats 

98 



WITH THE MARCH OF THINGS 

like a pair of school-children. He frankly 
delights in the beauty of her, as who would 
not? We secured, after some persuasion, 
her consent to stay for a few days, and I 
do not know that I ever saw him more 
contented at any ultimatum in his life. 
His talk at dinner was quite edifying. 
Indeed, he even made use of a Latin phrase 
or two, and when I managed to get him 
aside to quiz him about it later, he said 
those were trump cards he kept up his 
sleeve for emergencies. 

May Eve. This is the eve the fairies 
grant the desires of those who have faith 
in them, especially those who step in the 
primrose ring. Dare I enter that charmed 
circle tonight, I wonder, with a foolish 
wish of my own? 

Little book, little book, I haven't put 
down all I wanted to say today, and the 
reason was not for lack of time, for they 
gave me an hour in which I was supposed 
to be taking a nap. I have tacitly promised 
you my whole heart, and you shall have it. 
Strange new queries are humming in it, 
like bees in a clump of candytuft. Query 
1 : After all, is any normal man really 

99 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

proof to beauty in the concrete? Query 
2: Does he compare me, consciously or 
unconsciously, to her? Emerson, you know, 
has said somicwhere that the lover should 
never compare his beloved with any other 
woman. 

I have set these things down with reluc- 
tance. I am adding with still greater re- 
luctance, and I trust no jealousy (I have 
only contempt for a jealous person), I 
feel like a little brown turtle shorn of its 
last mark of adornment, and I wish, oh, 
I wish I could creep into my carapace! 

May 8. Another week has gone over our 
heads with incredible swiftness and tran- 
quility, leaving scarcely so much as a 
feather to mark its flight. June and I 
have scoured the woods in every direction, 
delving deeply into the green gloom, 
answering the love-calls of the birds, wash- 
ing our faces in the dew and gathering the 
lavender-tinted windflowers in their silvery 
down on the hills. More, we have talked 
volumes. Who is the kindly French psy- 
chologist who indorses woman's chatter, 
with the claim that it is more important 
to the race than any literature because by 

100 



WITH THE MARCH OF THINGS 

its iteration babes learn to talk? If this 
be true, mine will not be lacking for able 
tutorage when the time comes. 

June has just left for home, the Miracle 
Man taking her with Chu-chu as far as 
Cull Prairie, where she was obliged to 
leave her machine after an accident to a 
tire yesterday. She looked radiantly pretty 
behind that filmy veil of her's, light as a 
gossamer against the matchless rose of her 
cheeks. That last merry peal of her laugh 
I suspect was due to Chu-chu's stopping at 
the first hill. (Chu-chu, by the way, is 
what is known as a " courtin' horse *' 
hereabouts — which, however, has no refer- 
ence to his own amours.) 

I waved my handkerchief to her for the 
last time at the turn in the road, and then 
went back into the house and stood before 
the mirror in my bedroom and tried to 
make myself believe that the lump in my 
throat was due to her leaving. Really, I 
do not know what is the matter with me. 
Of this much only am I sure, I look the 
least attractive I ever did in my life, so 
little, indeed, I am reminded of a time when 
as a child I once stood and stared in 
horror at the caricature of my thin self in 

101 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

a convex mirror. So Nature makes us 
pay to the uttermost farthing! 

Aunt Marietta, who knows little of 
me now (I have not brought myself to the 
point of confiding in her yet), sent me a 
white satin girdle with a note for my 
birthday this morning — the first personal 
correspondence I've had in weeks. I 
promptly had hysterics. Also, there ar- 
rived by the same post, an ivory-backed 
hand-mirror which the Miracle Man had 
ordered sent out from the city. Gross 
extravagance, I moaned, thrusting it upside 
down into its silk-lined case. How the little 
Foxes of the Selfish Heart creep in and 
nibble the vines of the spirit! 

May 11, An elfin piping — a microphonic 
chorus in all the land. 

The languor of spring has laid its finger 
on me, and I haven't felt so well today. 
Also, factor of chiefest importance, I have 
had time to think of it. The Miracle 
Man has been away from home all day, 
working on a neighborhood barn. He came 
home late tonight, silent as a tomb and 
sullen as a bear. I had kept supper waiting 
nearly an hour, and the potatoes were 

102 



WITH THE MARCH OF THINGS 

fried to a frazzle, and the tea infused to 
that new shade of deep orange known in 
fashionable circles, I believe, as tango. 

Of course I was " fussed," and it made my 
headache worse. And — oh, I might as well 
out with it — I attacked him. I was tragic 
— tragic as Aunt Marietta gets on occa- 
sion (it's dreadful to have anything like 
that in your blood). I clasped my hands 
in hieratic gesture, too, and threw back 
my uncoifed head (the exigencies of the 
toilette annoy us little here, and my hair 
will never stay " put " at the nape of my 
neck). " You can smile at her! " I ac- 
cused in a trembling and pizzicato voice 
that was a fine imitation of Screechy, the 
hunting owl, when he tells his woes to the 
darkness, at night, on the cemetery fence. 
" You can smile at her! " 

He didn't say a word, and I went by 
him as majestically as the rather limited 
space would allow, into the other room, 
passing my mirror on a dog-trot and find- 
ing my destination at the sitting-room 
lounge, where I lay down, covering myself 
pathetically with my worsted shawl, while 
visions of a modern Hagar in the wilderness 
ran rife in my head. (Fancy Hagar in a 

103 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

navy blue, brocaded Mother Hubbard! 
I shall bury that particular article of dress 
when my ordeal is over, as the Miracle 
Man buried the suit in which he went to 
make the capture of a skunk.) 

I had just gotten as far in the history 
of Hagar as where the water was spent in 
the bottle, when " clink, clink, clatter, 
clatter." I began to discover that the 
lord of the manor, having probably finished 
his meagre repast, was putting the dishes 
away, and preparing to wash them with a 
great to-do among the china. Was I mis- 
taken, or did my ears tell me that his 
movements were clumsy even beyond a 
reasonable male limit of clumsiness? 

I reconnoitered, tiptoeing, and putting 
my head in abruptly at the kitchen door. 
The lamplight fell full on the awkwardly 
ministering hand nearest me — it was 
marked with a nail laceration and dis- 
tinctly swollen! He hadn't told me, it 
seemed, because (imagine the absurdity 
of it) he didn't want to worry me with his 
small troubles, and because (I deduced), 
manlike, he was ashamed of what he was 
pleased to call his awkwardness. 

Well, I succeeded after a fashion in 

104 



WITH THE MARCH OF THINGS 

bandaging the place — one needs several 
varieties of skill, I discover, to be a house- 
mother — and once more we are reeking of 
antiseptic like a small dispensary. 

He lies on the lounge I have deserted — 
just to please me, so he says — and smiles 
at me now and then, a kind of a pale smile 
despite his protestations to the contrary, 
and tired, very tired. " Put another lump 
of sugar in the tea, love," he says twit- 
tlngly, quoting the loved apostle of the Red 
Ribbon Movement, as he does sometimes 
when I fail of sweetness. 

Dear God, recoin me for his spending, I 
pray in the intervals of watching him. 
Create within me a new heart, large enough 
for true loving and with self shut out. 

And oh. Little Ego, if you should hap- 
pen, upon your arrival, to discover a little 
bald spot on the head of the woman you 
must needs call mother, remember it was 
put there by the coals of your father's 
heaping! 

May 15. Another wash day in the ever- 
lengthening series, with Norine Ricketty, 
who is seventeen, and Cissie's indifferent 
substitute, at the helm. 

105 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

Life is all very, very new to Norine. 
I have read in her eyes all day that she 
thinks it the height of madness to hang over 
a blankly unresponsive washtub when the 
skies are unutterably blue, the creek breeze 
stirring the young grasses and the redwing 
sounding his inviting, if mysterious, 0-ka- 
lee. (Half true, little girl, half true; and 
as subtle as half truths always are.) 

Norine is so little like Cissie, or any 
other member of her family for that mat- 
ter, that I am set wondering about that 
strange force that for w'ant of a more 
clearly defining name we call heredity, and 
how it, among other vaguely understood 
but powerful forces, disports itself among the 
humankind. She is clean, strangely clean, 
and pretty after the meaningless fashion of 
the stiff, highly-colored china doll so popu- 
lar with our grandmothers. Her eyes are 
quite as blue, with a gun-metal dullness over- 
casting them, her chin and forehead quite 
as china-white, her back quite as rigid. 
Her cheeks are the hue of pink japonicas, 
and her hair warm-colored as ripe oats. 
She has no nerves, I judge. In any event 
she can sit stone-still until one is seized 
with the desire to galvanize her into action, 

106 



WITH THE MARCH OF THINGS 

a condition arising, I fancy, rather from 
the gauche fear of doing the wrong thing 
than from any unwilHngness to move. 
She perches a gigantic bow of frayed 
scarlet ribbon, Hke a monster intoxicated 
redbird, at the top of her head, and makes 
eyes at Andy Mufifet, who has been plowing 
the garden-plat. (Whoever taught Norine 
to make eyes?) 

In token of his appreciation of her effort, 
Andy is whining dismally on his flute on 
the porch this evening — an occupation 
he alternates with a running, inflectionless 
recital concerning a recent " social " at 
Cull Prairie at which, according to his 
version, he was quite lionized. 

She flatters him whenever he speaks, 
with that most primitive and compelling 
feminine flattery — taking a silently re- 
spectful inventory of him, while cuddling to 
her breast Spotty Sue, who is wrapped in 
her scarf. 

Meanwhile, supper is in process of prep- 
aration. By the way, is that the vehement 
odor of burning bacon that assails my 
nostrils? Little book, your pardon a mo- 
ment. . . . The bacon was charred, but 
that's the least of the problems that con- 

107 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

front me. In passing the window, I saw 
Andy reach out a bold arm in the growing 
dusk and place it about the shoulders of the 
little girl beside him — the little girl, I 
learned today from a slighting remark 
from his own lips, he considers distinctly 
beneath him in a social way. 

And she, dryad of the woods that she is 
— why, she simply lifted her corn-silk 
lashes, and parted her Madonna mouth, 
and looked up at him with an expression 
that said as plainly as any words, that she 
would no more have thought of reproving 
him for the act than she would have 
thought of reproving a clean white angel 
for smiling at her out of a rift in the sky. 

May 18. Norine and I have had a frank 
talk anent the conventionalities of life and 
the reasons for their existence, and while I 
took up the role of instructor in it, she 
seemed not to resent the circumstance in the 
least. On the contrary, the little thing 
actually bridled, and there was a sug- 
gestion of triumph in her manner that 
might lead one to suspect she had tres- 
passed wilfully on another's possessions — 
only that Andy is so ridiculously young. 

108 



WITH THE MARCH OF THINGS 

Further, she gave me a pitying contempla- 
tive look out of those serene blue eyes of 
hers, which, being interpreted, probably 
meant: So you really think it necessary to 
ensconce oneself behind a hedge of make- 
believe thorns of thought and manner, do 
you? I'm sorry, but I presume I could 
hardly make you understand the delights 
of the free sunshine of unrestrained give 

and take. 

And again I am reminded, life is so very, 
very new to this child-woman, and the 
shadows of spring, which are like no other 
shadows at all in all the world, are on all 
the valley, bewitching us into who knows 

what. 

Who is to blame, little gaudy butterfly 
Norine, if you seek your natural heritage 
in the flower of admiration, and own as 
your sole philosophy: " take the gifts the 
gods provide you " ? 

Even a gaudy butterfly may have its 
resources. She pretended not to notice, 
though I saw her knuckles whiten with 
her clutch on the tin dipper from which 
she was drinking, and her cheeks flame like 
poppies, when Andy appeared in the porch 
tonight with his flute, and I think I know 

109 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

why. She has held up for his reading the 
deHcate waking woman-side of her, and he 
has grossly misunderstood. 

" Here's to you, colleen," smiled I silently 
over the rack of laundered clothes that 
represented our day's work. 

She showed her resourcefulness in another 
way, too. A swarthy faced gypsy woman 
from a wagon on the road came up to the 
door with the nightfall, and forcing her 
way in, emptied into her ragged skirt, 
held bag-fashion, a plateful of boiled pota- 
toes designed for breakfast, and departed 
without a " thank you." Returning, she was 
about to renew her exploits, when Norine, 
in a burst of inspiration, secreted herself 
behind the door and barked like a dog. 
The imitation was truly marvelous, and 
moreover effectual. " Here's to you, col- 
leen," murmured I again — this time, I am 
constrained to say, from the recesses of a 
corner where I was hiding. 

May 19. Will wonders ever cease? We 
have staged at the Rollin B. Barney abode 
tonight a party — an evening party — 
undeniably real, no matter how unique. 
Dramatis personse: the master of the house 

110 



WITH THE MARCH OF THINGS 

himself in his arm-chair at the window, 
legs crossed, frame tilted at a perilous 
angle, his whimsical smile playing over his 
large mouth at the strains of Humoresque 
proceeding from the new graphophone which 
arrived this morning by parcel post (to- 
gether with a dozen records) as a surprise 
for me; the mistress of the house, beaming 
absently and indiscriminately, and sneaking 
away at intervals for a confab with her 
beloved book; the Misses Ricketty and 
Andy Muffet, all in gala attire, and with 
ears wide to the music. Behold the gor- 
geousness of Andy in a new mail-order suit 
of a pronounced amethyst shade — ''snappy," 
the catalogue designates it, I believe. 
(How he pored over tha.t same catalogue 
to make his choice, lying on his stomach, 
infant fashion, on the sitting-room lounge!) 
Observe the keen consideration for minu- 
tiae — the white tie beneath his cherubic 
chin, with the skull-and-cross-bones scarf 
pin; the nickel badge on his lapel, with its 
crass modern inscription. Chicken Inspector; 
the long black cigar protruding from his 
vest pocket in positive assertion of his 
masculinity; his important stride (he steps 
like a Bantam in a flock of Plymouth 

111 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

Rocks); his omnipresence; his wanton good 
nature; his ingrained sense of his own cor- 
rectness. 

Norine, whose tipsy head-dress is pale 
blue tonight in honor of the occasion, and 
whose frock of threadbare white is by its 
cut and make, clearly second-handed, still 
looks at him wistfully askance, so he must 
perforce practice his wiles on Cissie. 

Cissie is one of those rare representa- 
tives of her sex who face a lack of pulchri- 
tude squarely. She makes no pretensions 
of any nature whatever, other than that a 
new black band confines her intractable 
hair, her face is a shade less sullen, and 
her one dress of anilin pink bears witness 
to a hastily joined rent, and an indifferent 
and rather recent ablution. Neither, seem- 
ingly, has she any notion of being fed out- 
right to the Minotaur of Andy's vanity. 
In one of the intervals unclaimed by the 
all but incessant mechanical purr of the 
graphophone, when Andy had repeated a 
finale vocally with much gusto, I heard 
her observe caustically, " If that's singin', 
cryin' must be mournful, Snookums " — 
(her pet name for him, bestowed in de- 
rision). 

112 



WITH THE MARCH OF THINGS 

But her eye and its trend belied the 
crispness of her speech, and I saw the dull 
color rise and recede under that ungirlish 
mask of hers when Andy retained Norine's 
hand unnecessarily long in a game they 
were playing. (It was not Adolesence 
mimicking Adult Life, mark you. Your 
child of ignorance and neglect leaps toward 
a rank maturity from the moment he is 
out of his swaddling clothes. Further, he 
mans his boat with the one oar — In- 
stinct.) An unaccountable change has come 
over Cissie, it occurs to me, since I saw 
her last, something sinister, and upon which 
I am unable to put my finger. 

Little Book, a hostess' time, you may 
have guessed ere now, is not her own. 
Just a word in parting. I perceive that 
in our party we shall have the usual num- 
ber of heart-burnings proportionately as 
harbored by the most elaborate fete, which 
is merely another case on record, I take it, 
to prove that 

" The Colonel's lady and Julia O'Grady 
Are sisters under their skin." 

And so the little social world of man's 
benighted making goes 'round! 

113 



CHAPTER IX 
Still Pressing On 

May 27. Babe-to-come, if you are a man- 
child, this page of your mother's heart is 
not for you, and you are in duty bound, 
should you chance to come upon it some 
dim and distant day, to turn it at once 
without reading. 

There! I've made myself reasonably se- 
cure, I hope, and may proceed to free my 
mind (womanwise, it is oddly disturbing to 
me to throttle an idea in silence). 

The truth is simply this: there are days, 
virginal days in a woman's life, when de- 
spite all previous conclusions to the con- 
trary, she despises man and his ways, 
both in the abstract and the concrete. 
In his heart of hearts he's a savage, dear 
little woman-child who may be reading 
this, a primal thing, the human in the 
rough, and it would not be honest to set 
down the most elemental history of him 
without making mention of the fact. 

All this apropos, obscurely enough, of a 

114 



STILL PRESSING ON 

tardy midweek ironing — the lilacs cajoled 
me out of doors on Tuesday, and laughed 
in my face at my faint demurrings. Who, 
let me ask in passing, can bury his nose in 
a clump of them, and doubt that God is 
good; yes, and that life is good, all good, 
even to the gripping death-end of it! 

Later, like all deserters of posts, big and 
little, I sweated out my penance in the 
additional effort demanded, in this case, 
by an undue dryness of the starched pieces: 
my pink print sacque with the Dutch 
neck, the sunbonnet to match with its 
two trying ruffles, the natty bungalow 
apron of my special pride. 

Today — and just here the cat steps 
serenely out of the bag — happening to 
open the closet door, my dear, listen! I 
came upon the print sacque on the floor, 
a muddy boot on top of it; the sunbonnet 
contended for its place with a slouchy felt 
hat with sagging band, and piling Pelion on 
Ossa, a shabby corduroy coat, distinctly 
" stablish " as to odor, crushed the final 
semblance of dignity out of that laboriously 
stiff apron. 

It was bad enough, to be sure, but I 
am here to relate the worst. 

115 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

I took the coat down with a vicious jerk 
(after recovering my breath), undecided 
between the floor and the ragbag as to its 
destination, when — no, this is not a fairy 
story — while I dehberated, it began to 
argue with me, and then to plead, and 
finally to hold out its arms. It's as wily 
as its owner. 

How did I answer the argument, you ask? 
Whisper. I, a presumably sane woman, ex- 
school-ma'am, cohead of a household, and 
candidate for honors to come, retreated with 
the thing to my lair, spent the greater part 
of an hour in the unnecessary performance 
of mending it, talked to it, patted it, caressed 
it with my cheek, and hung it back over the 
apron! 

Is this the usual effect of marriage, tell 
me, or simply a case of '' Qiios Deus vult 
perdere, prius dementat ".? 

May 29. I've had to give up my chief 
indoor diversion of changing the position 
of the various articles of furniture about 
the shack. To make the place seem new, 
and to lend that variety which is said to 
give the necessary piquancy to life, I have 
made a practice of experimenting indefi- 

116 



STILL PRESSING ON 

nitely in this line, trying the effect of a 
table in the corner, for example, as com- 
pared to the freer situation in the middle 
of the room. It is hard to feel " past your 
usefulness," as Andy Muffet's grandmother, 
who has come to make her home with the 
Muffets, says, expressing the hope, neverthe- 
less, that she may live until the varnish 
wears off the new chair the Prairie Sewing 
Society gave her for her birthday. I am 
unduly conscious of myself as I rise and 
walk about. A vagrant sense of something 
— something for which I have no explana- 
tion and no name, overwhelms me if even 
Norine's eye happens to dwell on me over- 
long. Only God's own breathing spaces 
really beckon me, and I prowl ardently in 
that thing of beauty to be — my flower 
garden — or lie listlessly under the eye of 
the spiked sun in Heaven, watching idly 
the passing of the white cloud flotillas. 
Curiously enough, even that fails to awaken 
in me real response, though I have never 
before been proof against such ministra- 
tion in my life. My spirit wanders forth 
on wayward feet in the burgeoning green, 
past the little Eden of cream-v/hite locust 
blossoms a-hum with the giddy bacchanale 

117 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

of the bees, to the bleak spots in my ex- 
perience. I feel a strange sense of kin- 
ship with the gnarled old apple-tree at the 
orchard gate — the one with the single 
pink clump of buds in its sparse foliage, 
and which, in the proper course of things, 
will be hewn down another season. If I 
die in my ordeal, I must remember to ask 
God why is Peter Ricketty's ninth baby. 

June 1. " Weeping may endure for a 
night, but joy cometh in the morning." 
My veins are singing rivers of delight. 
Roses, wild roses everywhere, pale pink 
to deep red, golden-hearted and fragrant 
as the breath of the gods, stirring the fires 
of ideality in our souls. How lavish be- 
yond belief is the Donor, filling our hands 
so full of the blessedness of earth, we are 
obliged to cry, " Stop." 

" Somebody," said stolid-seeming Cissie, 
who came up the path this morning with 
an entrancing armful, " somebody mus' 
care 'n awful sight fer us — somebody 
that'd take the trouble t' count out all o' 
them pink leaves s' careful." I was sur- 
prised to see a slow tear splash on the 
pink blossoms as she said it. 

118 



STILL PRESSING ON 

For some reason, Cissie is not herself, 
but I have had Httle time in which to try- 
to win her confidence. Andy Muffet, who 
is our gardener-now-and-then (Cissie sniffs, 
and says he uses a hoe hke a pickaxe), has 
claimed the whole of the stage today. 
His excuse for doing so is that he has had a 
place offered him in the mill, of which he 
is more than proud, old Joel Tibbs, the 
present miller, who, it seems, has had him 
in training, off and on, for some time, being 
about to leave. He acquainted us with the 
news immediately upon his arrival, swagger- 
ing with importance, and nothing would do 
but that we must visit the scene of his 
future labors at once. So Cissie and I 
this afternoon have duly admired the ob- 
scured view from each white-clogged win- 
dow, and sniffed in the musty, floury odor, 
and stepped upon the scales to be weighed, 
and even invaded old Joel's bachelor 
apartments in the little mill house hard by, 
so reeking of rank tobacco that our stay 
was brief. Andy offered to walk home with 
Cissie from this point, with an alacrity 
that told me he was planning to have the 
evening free to sit on the porch as usual 
with Norine, whom I have kidnapped for 

119 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

my own, and boast of his success and his 
prowess. 

Somehow, I do not Hke the idea of even 
such a harmless-seeming wolf as he playing 
fast and loose in my girlish sheepfold. 
And I have not a mother's voice in the 
matter. I sit at my window and worry 
and watch with the futile concern of a 
mother-hen w^ith ducklings. Last night 
I went to sleep with my head on the sill. 

June 2. That implacable little bravo, 
Fate, tired, no doubt, of seeing me lie idle 
on the chess-board of things-that-be, has 
begun to shuffle me about with a ven- 
geance. I am on my way to Aunt Mari- 
etta's. Aunt Marietta, I learned this 
morning by letter, is ill and wants me. I 
have premonitions — not particularly with 
regard to her illness, for she says it is 
merely one of her old attacks of " nerves," 
but vague ones I can't locate, with regard 
to leaving. But then, my premonitions 
are like weeds, springing up anywhere on 
small provocation, and flourishing in any 
soil. I shall not be gone longer than three 
days, I plan, and I have left careful orders, 
including instructions as to the hour and 

120 



STILL PRESSING ON 

place of meeting me at my return. What 
important creatures we women of family 
come to believe ourselves! 

Later. A motor truck has just jarred 
by the front window of this flat like a 
djinn of destruction. The buzzing city, 
a sooty mass of bricks and mortar, hard at 
heart as its concrete pavings, lies below in 
the summer sun. Bartering here, bartering 
there, and greed, the septic poisoning, at 
work at its vitals! How does any one 
ever endure its immutable clutch and 
sphinx-like gaze, day in and day out, with- 
out change? A glimpse at its tinselled 
trappings, its sparkling night-life, its poly- 
tinted confusion — yes — I enjoy it as I 
might a taste of caviar, but, as a regular 
diet, how, how find it palatable? 

This was the question I put to Aunt 
Marietta, who was lying back, pouting, in 
her easy-chair, in a flowered dressing-gown, 
having been basely deserted by Aunt 
Idella, who, it appears, is out on the trail 
of a " new cult." Aunt Marietta is per- 
fectly contented with it, however, she 
maintains. Poor exotic soul, she is horrified 
at my tanned arms and roughened nails and 

121 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

sunburned nose, to say nothing of the " chief- 
est revelation " when I removed my ulster. 

*' The place will get you, if the loneliness 
of it does not," she laments, modifying her 
lachrymose prediction. " You are part and 
parcel of it already." 

Poor Aunt Marietta! Alone here in my 
room, I close my eyes and feel the coolness 
of the blessed green of leafage of that de- 
spised place, the unanalyzable delight of 
its colorful skies, the caress of its fluting 
and quivering breeze, yes, even the wrench 
of the wind in spiteful mood; and wonder, 

** With thou beside me," my Miracle Man, 
" Singing in the wilderness," 

was ever a transplanted thing more satisfied 
with the plat of its adoption? 

June 5. The jerking and chugging and 
lengthy stops of this so-called milk train 
are driving me mad. It seems to me as if 
I have been away from home a month, 
and I feel soiled and crumpled and fidgety 
in spite of myself, while I admire and 
envy the sweet, unmoved placidity of the 
white-haired elderly woman across the 
aisle, the one with the handsome turban 

122 



STILL PRESSING ON 

and the cloIsonn6 chain and the long white 
gloves. (Little girl-child who may be read- 
ing this one day, if I should go out of the 
world when you come into it, I do not 
want you to think of your mother as hav- 
ing been a person who despised pretty, 
womanly trifles, neither as agreeing en- 
tirely with the woman who asserted that 
clothes are capable of giving a sense of well- 
being that religion can never give. That 
there are times when they contribute to the 
mind's serenity, I shall not attempt to deny, 
in spite of a personal prejudice, born, no 
doubt, of having viewed them for years over 
the dividing line of a long series of desires 
crucified.) 

Meantime, my foolish premonitions, which 
I have been unable to down in my absence, 
occupy the time in thronging about me. 
Ridiculously enough, I do not know what 
I fear. 



At the station. 

There is no one here to meet me. Why 
this cavalier desertion? A half hour of 
waiting has availed nothing. If only I 
had an inkling of the reason. Perhaps I 

123 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

could hire a conveyance, but I have no 
idea where, and I do not feel equal to the 
exertion of finding out. I hang on the 
kindly offices of Peter Ricketty, who is in 
town, I discover, with a starey look in his 
eyes, and a voice so thick as to make his 
utterance practically unintelligible. 



Home! Yes, actually. I confess I had 
given up all hope of arriving at this little 
caravansary by the road alive. Peter 
Ricketty, in some freak of drunken en- 
deavor, drove all the way at breakneck 
speed, laying the whip heavily on his 
crippled nag, singing at the top of his 
voice, and refusing to listen to any pro- 
tests, or answer any questions. The rank 
odor of his whiskey and tobacco-laden 
breath is still in my nostrils. I feel as if 
I had been dreaming, and was not yet 
awake. Maybe I am crazy to sit here 
telling my woes to the Book o' My Heart 
in such a time as this, but I might as well 
so indulge myself, to all intents and pur- 
poses; there is no one else at hand. Like 
one under a spell, I've kindled the kitchen 
fire and put some water in the kettle for 

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STILL PRESSING ON 

tea I do not seem to need. . . . Some one 
has just appeared at the bend in the road 
toward which I have been straining my 
eyes. By a flash of flapping pink and the 
gallant stride of the narrow-hipped wearer, 
I should say it is my usual rescuer. 

June 6. I am still minus the mate of my 
bosom, but I think I can say that my mind 
is at least a little easier on that score; 
that is, if there is any room in it just now 
for ease. I shall never forget my interview 
with Cissie yesterday noon, though I live 
to be a hundred. Poor child, if I had been 
a grim Inquisitor there could not have 
been more of fear in her slant brown eyes 
or greater determination in her approach. 
Gone entirely was the ungirlish mask of 
her customary wearing; her face was white, 
dead -white and tear-marked, and its ex- 
pression so plainly that of grief and re- 
morse that the veriest child could not have 
failed in its reading. 

But her first thought was of me. " Ye'U 
be wan tin' to know about yer man," was 
what she said, jerking the sentence out 
with an effort; " he's all right; he's gone 
after Andy." 

125 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

" After Andy? " I echoed weakly, com- 
pletely in the dark. 

" Yes'm, Mrs. Barney; Andy, he's made 
trouble, awful trouble; an' he's gone — 
nobody knows where. I had to tell Mr. 
Rollin, pa bein' not fit." 

She threw herself onto the floor rigidly, 
with a tearless sob. 

I opened my mouth, and closed it again 
with a snap. A light broke in on me. 
For the first time, I placed my vague fears 
as having to do with Norine and Andy. 

"It — it is never our poor little Norine 
he has made a victim of ? " I forced my- 
self to ejaculate feebly, at last. 

Cissie crumpled visibly ; then she looked up 
like an animal at bay — a poor dumb thing 
in a trap, and I got the shock of my life. 

" It's me an' him 's done the wrong," 
she burst forth as if the words had been 
hot lava, " me an' him. An' — an' that 
ain't all. Norine knows, an' she's took to 
her bed. I guess I've broke the pretty 
little heart of her — an ugly, underhand wart 
like me! " 

June 7. Cissie and I are still groping 
our way alone together through the maze of 

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STILL PRESSING ON 

things — to nothing. For who can recall 
the yesterday which he has marred and 
furbish it up so that its consequences will 
not abide with him today, yes, and ofttimes 
through all the days to come, hard and 
relentless though the reckoning may seem? 
The question is too big for us, and we 
sit and hold hands wordlessly over it, 
while going over and over the ground in 
thought. 

" Oh, I didn't know, I couldn't know, 
Mis' Barney," is the burden of this girl- 
woman's cry, through tears that are a 
bitter baptismal chrism of tardy-born knowl- 
edge; and in an extenuating summing-up, 
I remember the stultifying poverty she 
knows, the lax mother-care, her natural 
jealousy of a fairer sister to whom such 
desirable things as came their way have 
always poured out like an essence. ("When 
she was ten, a lady give her a doll, an' 
said nar' a word to me," she says among 
other things, in bitter reminiscence. "An' — 
an', oh. Mis' Barney, when first Andy used 
to meet me at the head o' the lane, what 
made me the happiest o' all was to think 
maybe somebody liked me better'n her fer 
all her pretty face an' the shine to her 

127 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

hair. I'd — I'd — I guess I'd 'a' done 
almost anything to make it so! ") 

It is a sober and still day, uneventful, 
and long as the spine of a diplodocus, but 
that it will leave its mark on both of us 
goes without saying. 

June 8. Mis' Muffet has put out her 
maternal antennae — now that it is too 
late. For the first time in months she de- 
serted the fastnesses of her retreat in the 
shadow of the smithy, and swooped down 
upon us like a galleon sailing. Cissie fled 
to the haystack, and I stood up, refusing 
to play the role of spider for her, when she 
seized the chair I designated and dragged 
it near my own. All the time she kept 
up a bass denunciation of everybody con- 
cerned in this that has come to pass, or 
that she imagines in any way concerned — 
except her Andy. 

" I never dremp o' no sech a thing, no, 
sir, I didn't! " was her continual reitera- 
tion. And, " No, madam," I was minded 
to answer, " m.ost of the realities of life lie 
just over the rim of our dreams." 

But I kept my own counsel and struggled 
with my temper, while I ached to tell her, 

128 



STILL PRESSING ON 

as every school-ma'am in the land has 
ached sometimes to tell some mother, 
" Yes, my dear woman, it is quite possible 
for him to do wrong, even though he happens 
to be your son." 

" He ain't of age, an' I'll never give 
my consent to him marryin' no Ricketty," 
she announced flatly at last, with a firmness 
that sent my heart into my shoes. 

I am free to say that I hardened that 
organ to Mis' Muffet then and there, but 
there was a little gulp in my throat for 
all that v/hen she started for the door, 
and I saw that she went blindly for her 
tears. " An' I was that tickled when he 
got the place in the mill," she was 
saying with the naivette of a child, and 
with a shakiness of voice she strove vali- 
antly to control, " I give our dog Ponto a 
hull sausage fer his supper! " 

June 9. The strays have returned, the 
Miracle Man pale and unsmiling and ab- 
stracted as a Trappist. He says little, but 
I read meaning into what he does not say. 
We have never before been separated so 
long in our wedded life. He has been 
worried, and it has not been an agreeable 

129 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

trip. Andy acts like a prisoner, but his 
round, pretty boy's face is little changed, 
and he eats heartily. (I had baked beans 
for supper, and he passed his plate for 
a third helping.) Cissie, whom I finally 
prevailed upon to come to the table, for 
her part, scarcely touched a mouthful. 
At first sight of Andy, I thought she would 
faint. 

Alone with my Miracle Man, I have suc- 
ceeded in worming from him some of the 
details of the chase. Characteristically, he 
takes no credit to himself, saying that any 
one who had known Andy from his in- 
fancy could be reasonably certain of his 
movements, and that it demanded no 
Sherlock Holmes to trace him and a boy 
cousin he had induced to accompany him 
on their way West. The boy cousin, it 
appeared, had soon tired of his bargain, 
and, when found, Andy was alone on a 
depot bench, chewing dejectedly on the 
contents of a huge bag of peanuts, his big 
eyes moist with tears. (Under the Binet 
test, I imagine he would be about five 
years old.) I fancy him slipping his hand 
into his pursuer's like a little man, weeping 
on his neck, and promising to be good. 

130 



STILL PRESSING ON 

Just now he is asleep on the lounge, his 
arm curled under his head, his chest rising 
and falling peacefully, his long, curling 
lashes sweeping his Greuze cheeks. Cissie 
kneels at the window, her arms folded on 
the sill, her unslept eyes peering into the 
dark, her inner vision intent on what I 
cannot say, traveling the usual way of 
woman — to the cross — alone. 

Little Ego, a wonderful bit of news for 
you before I close the book. Mis' Muffet 
returned tonight in all that adipose dignity 
of hers, determined, as she intimated, to 
have her say out and make clear her stand. 

In her first paroxysm of wrath, however, 
her eye happened to fall on a little bonnet 
I had been embroidering for you — a little 
white bonnet, dear, with blue ribbon 
rosettes. She stopped short, picked it up, 
smoothed it with a huge hand, and burst 
into tears. Since then she has been as 
wax in our hands. Little Ego, Little Ego, 
only think what it means! Already you 
have had a part in the world's work. Is 
it not wonderful, indeed? 

June 10. We have had a wedding — 
just imagine — a wedding at high noon, 

131 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

by special dispensation, at The Cabin, 
today. I was up betimes to make the 
cake, tiptoeing back and forth with a 
testing-straw between my lips, after I had 
it in the oven, like a huge, imbecile robin 
looking for a place to build a nest. And 
one layer was brown, and another red, and 
a third white to prove beyond perad venture 
it was a gala cake, and when all were in 
their places on the baking rack, I went 
down on my knees beside the oven door in 
a sort of wordless supplication that the 
whole might turn out worthy the occasion. 
And my prayer was answered; really, let 
me set it down for my own satisfaction: 
that parti-colored creation of art stood up 
properly, bore its icing like a major, and 
looked almost intelligent. (If only I could 
preserve this, my chef-d'ceuvre in some 
kind of a cake-mausoleum for the inspec- 
tion of future generations!) 

The warm, fragrant breath of its baking 
that penetrated every nook and cranny in 
the house had barely died away when 
the young minister who has newly taken 
charge of our country church — a nice 
boy, with sincere eyes and an understanding 
smile — arrived, having walked cross-lots 

132 



STILL PRESSING ON 

through the woods. After him came our 
mild, if powerful, smith and Mis' Muffet, 
the latter chastened as to smile and re- 
cherche as to manner and wearing a black 
silk dress that needed only nickel trim- 
mings to make her resemble an old-fash- 
ioned parlor stove. I was relieved to see 
her shake hands with Norine Ricketty, 
who decided to leave her bed for the event, 
and who stood at the door in her second- 
handed frock, red-eyed and staring. (Norine 
arrived early with the jumbled excuse 
for the remainder of the family: " Pa's 
anussin' Cicero's sore foot, an' ma ain't gone 
nowheres sence her front teeth is out." 

And there was our bride, like a voluptuous 
figure of brown bisque, with some, if not 
quite all, of her old manner back, and her 
bridegroom, who has a wholesome respect 
for her, if nothing else, despite the inferior 
social position he has been taught to think 
of her as occupying — red-mouthed and 
with the hangdog air of one emerging from 
a penitential cell, his baby face actually 
sobered. 

And the sun shone, though the weather 
for the most part, of late, has been as 
indifferent and un-summerlike as possible, 

133 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

save in unduly warm snatches; and the 
birds sang in supernal staves, ecstatic 
melodies, perfect sapphics of sound. 

On the whole, I think we achieved the 
savor of a real wedding, and only a single 
flagrant incident marked the occasion as 
not being of the elite. Norine looked up 
vindictively in one of the pauses of the 
service and said to me in an audible 
whisper, that she " reckoned Cissie'd put 
him " (the bridegroom) " through a course 
of sprouts." 

I am not certain that I know what a 
"course of sprouts" is; but I feel sure 
that Andy, for all his present meekness, 
needs it. 

June 19. I had my first visit from the 
bridegroom this morning, when he brought 
me some chick-feed, filling an order. (He 
and Cissie are at the Muffet home next 
the smithy for the time being.) 

He was as unconscious and serene in his 
white miller-boy suit and cap as if the 
current of his life had never been so much 
as breeze ruffled, so embedded is he in the 
stucco of his youthful conceit. 

But he is fairly capable in a simple 

134 



STILL PRESSING ON 

business transaction, and his sunny good- 
nature disarms one. He bent his round, 
chunky, amiable back for a half hour in the 
strawberry patch to show his good-will, 
the luscious red berries contrasting well 
with his plump white fingers, and admired 
at length, at my bidding, the delicately 
green alfalfa of our pride. 

On two things, chiefly, do I stake my 
hope for his future: the dignity of being 
a married man (he will be twenty-one in 
September) appeals to him as does a 
weapon of warfare to a small boy, and 
though the fascination may be dimmed 
with time, he will grow naturally with the 
ties of responsibility. 

He announces with the air of one who 
has lived down a reckless and tragic past: 
" No more crooked work for me; it makes 
things too uneasy for a man." 

In all truth, I should think the last few 
weeks might have impressed at least that 
one practical and ever present aspect of all 
sin permanently upon him! 

June 30. For a solid week, Norine and 
I have helped put the little mill house in 
order for our newly weds, and yet we linger 
at the task. 

135 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

(Norine, whose currents of feeling run 
infinitely more shallow, I suspect, than do 
Cissie's, has forgotten in the novelty of it 
that there is such a thing as a possible 
lover in the world, though even old Joel's 
eyes follow her pretty hands as she picks 
gingerly among the unique assortment of 
pipes and fish-hooks and buttons and ten- 
penny nails we are attempting to reduce to 
sufficient order to enable him to remove 
them from the place.) 

These unpremeditated weddings entail 
work — and scrimping, often. They have 
had to do with the barest necessities in 
the furniture outlay. But Cissie has lost 
her mask in the undertaking. She looks 
human, and sufficient unto herself. Life 
has brought her the unexpected boon of a 
home of her own, and, watching her, I 
send up a silent prayer that she may not 
have to go too far alone on the way, nor 
know the warping touch of over-harsh 
criticism. 

Andy came up whistling this afternoon 
while we rested on a bench outside, and 
Norine and I exchanged significant looks 
to see him stop and clean his feet on the 
mat at the door — an act entirely new to 

136 



STILL PRESSING ON 

him. As true reformation, like many another 
great thing with which we are acquainted, 
commonly manifests itself in a small be- 
ginning, my hope for him brightens. 



137 



CHAPTER X 
Fruition 

July 2. A sharp dearth of events — a 
vacuum after the excitement of the last 
few weeks — has thrown us deep into our- 
selves for social nourishment. 

We have fallen back upon lover-like 
ways, walking hand in hand in the garden 
at evening; riding out under quiet stars 
where the young blades of corn whisper 
their nightly prayers, where the barley 
lies golden in the dusk, and the green-gold 
fireflies dart like friars' lanterns; returning 
in speech to the phraseology of our earliest 
love letters. A lover and his lass are we 
— almost, and then. Little Ego, you come 
back, delicate, palpitating keynote to a 
poignant recollection, and we are reminded 
of the greater riches of wedded love — 
the love which is " all made of faith and 
service." By what name shall we call you 
when we are obliged to attach to you some- 
thing so prosaic as the name of man or woman 
— that is the question that is troubling us now. 

138 



FRUITION 

We have run the whole gamut from Anne 
to Zachariah, and each in its turn has 
fallen absurdly short. 

July 8. My flower beds for their idyllic 
beauty ttnd sweetness might be tiny rep- 
licas of those of some old-fashioned Eden. 

Rosemary, lavender, sweet-william, old 
man, poppies, nasturtiums, all are here, a 
riotous arabesque of color. 

How patient the buds are! So patient, I 
would that I might learn waiting from 
them, waiting which is woman's lesson no 
less than their's. 

One of the odd vagaries of memory 
brings to my mind a garden, in which I 
played as a child, a narrow, walled-in city 
garden at whose limited confines even the 
wooden, one-armed doll companion of those 
hours v/as wont to protest, being found 
most frequently at the very edge of the 
wall. 

I have wondered since, with the recollec- 
tion of much idling, why we needs must 
spend so many years before the day of 
our usefulness, when there is so much to 
do in this world and so little time to do 
it in. 

139 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

Preparation, however unconscious, is not 
that the secret? How could I know that a 
painted, crippled doll was a lesson in 
mothering from life's great book on the 
economics of love? 

Little Ego, how soon shall I have my 
reward for the study of that lesson? 

July 10. History repeats itself even across 
the centuries. We have entertained angels 
unawares. The Miracle Man was planing 
a board at the door of his tent, and he 
lifted up his eyes and looked, and lo! 
three men stood by him. (It seems a pity 
to be obliged to add such hopelessly modern 
touches as the chugging of the machine 
which brought them, and the patent leather 
shoes which encumbered their feet, which 
I feel sure should have been sandaled, but 
one may not juggle with the truth in 
history.) 

They remained for dinner, and while 
they talked much and genially, they re- 
vealed little concerning their errand. 

It has transpired since, however, that 
they are interested in the stone-quarry 
which is Next-to-Nowhere's chief asset. 
If the company they represent decide to 

140 



FRUITION 

buy, it will make all the difference in the 
world, I dare say, to our little hamlet. 

My dear, shall we yet be Next-to-Some- 
where, or even Somewhere itself? 

You should hear the chorus of the birds 
at dawn these mornings, and note the 
sparrows taking delicately frugal breakfasts 
from dandelion fluff. 

They have no sordid ambitions. For 
them, life is just to be glad and thank God. 

July 26. The ring of the hammer is 
heard in the land. Early and late It re- 
sounds, drowning the flute-like call of the 
v/ood-thrush at evening, and the cat- 
bird's mocking cry. 

The thing we have looked for has come 
to pass. The generous pagan sun looks 
down surprised from a milky wash of sky 
on our seething caldron of activity. We 
shall have the railroad, lodging houses, new 
homes — a systematic network devised by 
the mind of man — a cosmos which our 
present chaos makes possible. 

Where the squirrels played, Italians walk 
and gibber, flashing white teeth. We are 
at the mercy of flotsam and jetsam. 
Yesterday Norine and I had a call from a 

141 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

blond Viking tramp with a blood-wrinkling, 
insane glare. 

He departed peaceably upon persuasion, 
but we shall have to pull in our latch string. 

The Miracle Man is so busy, I scarcely 
get a glimpse of him. We will share in the 
progress, of course, but at the cost of more 
separation. 

My spirits are barometrical. I look on 
with some regret and a vapid taste of 
emptiness. Such is the caprice of the 
human mind! After all, did we really want 
it? Do we ever know what we really want? 

July 30. My hour approaches, and my 
heart beats high with greed. Mine, mine, 
mine! A potent word in any language, so 
long as Self exists in the human soul. 
I might have learned to love some other 
woman's child — yes, but never, I fear, in 
the same way. 

The little clothes are ready to my hand; 
in my mind's eye I see a precious mite of 
curled body under the blue-striped baby- 
blanket, a little downy head on the crib 
pillow. 

Mine, mine, m.ine; I chant it like an 
incantation! 

142 



FRUITION 

If — if — that grisly '' if " that con- 
fronts all expectant mothers is with me 
still, but I shall not again set it down in 
words. Should it sweep me with it, when 
the time comes, leaving you without the 
shelter of mother-arms, there is just this 
that I want to say as a guide to you in 
some hour of need you may face in the 
future — your aegis against the world : 
Life is not complex; it is simple. It 
gives you measure for measure just as you 
give to it. Walk with Him who has sent 
you with some particular destiny in mind 
for you. Walk so closely that you cannot 
help find out what it is, and glory in 
the wisdom of His will. " There is no 
difficulty in which He cannot help you, 
except the difficulty you do not take to 
Him." 

A little Bible which is for you, dear, is 
in the top drawer of your mother's dresser. 
The print is not so clear as I should have 
liked, and the binding leaves much to be 
desired, but the wealth of the Indies would 
not be a richer legacy to you. 

August 26. You are here. Aline Barney, — 
(that is the name I had in my holy of 

143 



THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE 

holies all of the time; I never wanted a 
son, much less since I have seen you), — 
indeed, you have been here three weeks, 
and are therefore now no stranger, though 
your father who, bless his heart, has freely 
forgiven you your sex, and is already your 
willing slave, demands of you your name 
each day — and your business. 

The old doctor says you are simply a 
normal, everyday baby. Poor old fellow, 
how benighted one becomes wiling away a 
lifetime in the hills. 

We know you're a princess — a wonder- 
ful Celtic princess, with a red-gold halo, 
fat little dimpled fists, eyes that are the 
very counterpart of our Miracle Man's, 
gray heliotrope, and a mouth that is a bow 
of sweetness. Have you not in your retinue 
Cissie and Norine and Andy — yes, and 
June Craddock and Asking Mary, who is 
"asking" no longer — all of them worship- 
pers — idolators, if you will? 

The reality of your presence transcends 
every dream. 

The universe is transfigured for us. 

"Joy," say I, "never feasts so high as 
when the first course is of misery." 

Little Aline, the book of your mother's 

144 



FRUITION 

heart is done. It shall be put away for 
you, with the prayer that you may find 
a crumb of comfort in it some day. 

For the nonce (a primal christening this), 

" I have lifted you up to the wild wind and the 
warm light of the sun, 
That both may receive you, and make you theirs — 
Oh, little, glorious one! 

" The wild, west wind shall give you its strength — 
of its song and will a part, 
And the deep, sweet warmth of the golden sun 
shall lie for aye in your heart." 



145 



■^i.^ !' "-a^--?*; 



